Success stories about social change rarely start with large guns. But, as it turns out, there’s a lot that philanthropy can learn from looking at the history of artillery—the cannons that would get drawn to the edge of a battlefield, first by horses and later by large trucks, to shell the enemy from a distance.

According to military folklore, shortly before World War II the US and British armies conducted a joint exercise and came to a strange realization: The American artillery team fired just a little bit faster than the British squad every time. They analyzed the process and found that just before the British would fire, several soldiers would step back and pause for a second. They would wait until the gun fired, and then rejoin their team to reload.

No one was certain why this hitch was part of the process. When asked, the soldiers simply explained, “That’s how we were trained to do it.” The military asked several experts to get to the bottom of the slowdown. But no one could figure it out until a veteran from the Second Boer War finally provided the answer. He watched the process, thought about it for a minute, and then explained: “I know what they’re doing,” he said. “They’re holding the horses.”

Because back when teams of horses pulled the guns to the battlefield, if no one stepped back to hold the horses’ reins, the animals would bolt at the sound of the shot. Amazingly—decades after horses were no longer involved—the practice carried on.

Understanding Orthodoxies, Good and Bad

Our colleagues at the innovation strategy firm Doblin refer to such holdovers as orthodoxies—deeply held beliefs about “how things are done” that often go unstated and unquestioned. You can find them everywhere—in the mind of an individual, the protocols of an organization, even the best practices of an entire industry.

They can be highly useful: Orthodoxies help create standard practices that enable individuals and institutions to function more efficiently. But they can also lead to a dogmatic resistance to change and (as with the soldiers) blind spots in decision-making that can prevent organizations from developing better ways of working.

Every organization and industry has orthodoxies. In its early days, Southwest Airlines challenged many of the commercial aviation industry’s longstanding practices—getting rid of first class, flying only one type of airplane, and using a customer service model aimed at making the flying experience “fun.” In the bookselling industry, Amazon has flipped several orthodoxies in recent years, first by building its business model around the idea that books could be sold online rather than at a brick-and-mortar store, and again by making a bet on e-books instead of sticking to the idea that reading requires paper-based products.

Orthodoxies in Philanthropy

The field of philanthropy has its share of orthodoxies too. For example, the idea that grants are a foundation’s most important product, that funders shouldn’t take controversial positions, that philanthropy should support only proven approaches, that foundations should invest their assets to maximize financial returns. The list is nearly endless.

But as the world around philanthropy changes rapidly, it’s important to consciously examine the orthodoxies that guide practice and determine whether these old assumptions are still valid, and whether we ought to carry them forward or flip them on their heads—partially or completely.

Many innovative funders are already beginning to question some of the most deep-seated orthodoxies of the field. Take the Telluride Foundation, a small community foundation in Colorado. Telluride is countering the common belief that foundations operate only in the nonprofit world. The foundation manages a venture accelerator for early-stage and startup businesses in areas such as tourism, energy, and education. Each year, it enrolls up to six entrepreneurs in a five-month accelerator camp that includes equity investment, mentorship, and networking. The program taps Telluride’s community of entrepreneurs and second homeowners as mentors, coordinates with small-business development centers for targeted training, and runs an online community forum for the entrepreneurs.

Another example is the S.D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, one of a number of foundations that are now challenging the assumption that foundations are built to be permanent. The foundation has elected to spend down its assets by 2020, guided by the belief that applying its assets more intensively in the short term can make a greater impact on California’s most-urgent education and environmental challenges than giving just a small fraction of its assets in perpetuity.

Or look at the way the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (SVCF) has flipped the traditional idea that philanthropy should stay out of public policy. SVCF has taken a strong stand against payday lenders by testifying at city, county, state, and federal government meetings to educate officials; meeting one-on-one with legislators to ask for their vote on bills; and even putting a lobbyist on retainer. The foundation has funded 501(c)(3)s and 501(c)(4)s, as well as city government departments, to conduct research and raise awareness, and has supported a coalition of grantee and foundation advocates against predatory lending. As a result of the foundation’s work, 12 local municipalities established ordinances to cap the number of payday lenders that operate in their areas, and state lawmakers enacted new regulations strengthening consumer protections, such as stopping attempts to raise the maximum loan amount and establishing a payday-loan alternative pilot program.

Finding and Flipping Orthodoxies That Have Outlived Their Usefulness

These types of examples only begin to scratch the surface of what might be possible if we begin to actively talk about the orthodoxies of philanthropy. Orthodoxies are by definition rarely questioned or challenged, making them extremely difficult to surface, discuss head-on, and move past. But continuing to simply do business as usual may mean that philanthropic organizations miss out on critical opportunities for impact. Flipping deep-seated orthodoxies can lead to dramatic improvements in practice and even point the way to fundamentally new models for doing business.

Innovative funders can begin by creating time and space—even if it’s just an hour at a staff or board meeting—to think explicitly about the orthodoxies within their own operations, brainstorming as many of these engrained assumptions as possible. The simple act of naming the orthodoxies can be a powerful exercise in itself—and a good reminder that just because things have been done in a certain way in the past doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best way to continue to do them in the future.

Once funders identify their own orthodoxies, they can ask a cascading set of questions about each one:

Does the orthodoxy still make sense, or should we flip it, either partially or completely?

Are there others in philanthropy, other industries, or other places that are challenging the orthodoxy and doing things differently?

What would it look like if we flipped the orthodoxy? How would the work be different and what new solutions might emerge?

By identifying and challenging orthodoxies in this way, organizations can begin to reimagine their business models in the context of today’s rapidly changing world. This isn’t necessarily to say that new ways of working are better—but the process of being conscious of existing orthodoxies, and intentionally questioning whether they still make sense, can be the first step to ensuring that your organization isn’t leftholding the horses in the years to come.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/06/29/challenging-orthodoxies/feed/0The Value Exchange Tool: building business-nonprofit partnerships that lasthttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/05/29/the-value-exchange-tool-building-business-nonprofit-partnerships-that-last/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/05/29/the-value-exchange-tool-building-business-nonprofit-partnerships-that-last/#commentsFri, 29 May 2015 21:15:56 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2726A recurring theme that has emerged in our conversations with nonprofits and social enterprises in recent months is the perception that, even as strides are made in cross-sector collaborations, a persistent power imbalance exists in partnerships with for-profit corporations. Social sector organizations clearly see significant benefits of partnering with a corporation – but they often struggle to articulate the value they bring to the relationship, in terms that resonate with their corporate partner. We have created a simple value exchange tool (download here) to help non-profits and social enterprises more crisply articulate the kinds of value they stand to offer for-profit partners and would expect to gain in return—one that we believe is valuable for business leaders as well.

Much has been written in recent years about “shared value” approaches to building social impact goals into the heart of a businesses’ practices. Partnering with nonprofits is integral to that work, but so far the discussion of shared value hasn’t yielded practical tools to make those partnerships effective. Such tools are needed, since the leap from identifying a potential partner towards agreeing to the “gives and gets” between partners isn’t always a straightforward process. Add in the fact that the social sector partner often brings contributions that are more qualitative in nature and harder to measure, and a risk surfaces that some contributions may remain obscured and therefore undervalued. We believe that clearly articulating the capabilities and value a social sector organization brings to a partnership is critical to attracting new partners and positioning partnerships for success.

To that end, the value exchange tool provides a frame for capturing four distinct categories of value where each party stands to benefit and contribute – Reach, Assets, Reputation, and Capabilities:

Reach: How will this exchange open new doors and bring greater scale?

Assets: When resources are pooled, what goals are now within reach?

Reputation: In what ways will this boost visibility and enhance perception with stakeholders?

Capabilities: What learning opportunities will this present and skills could be deployed?

In answering these questions, a partner may find that its organization excels in one dominant category or a combination of categories. Perhaps it brings a strong network of active members, who will be valuable when it comes to expanding the reach of the partnership, or strong name-recognition that will add reputational credibility to the collaboration. Populating the tool pushes potential partners to identify their strengths, and also reveals gaps where the contributions of a partner could complement the organization’s own capabilities. By specifically naming the kinds of value being exchanged in a partnership, this tool may help social sector organizations offer more compelling reasons for for-profits to partner with them, stimulate more creative, innovative thinking about how for-profits and social sector organizations can work together, and suggests more specific ways to measure the success of a given partnership. For for-profit leaders, it could help stimulate better-quality conversation with potential nonprofit partners, articulate the rationale for partnership to share with senior leaders in the organization, and likewise suggest specific ways to pursue measurement.

We see what we are sharing here as an initial version of this tool that we expect to evolve over time. Recently we had the chance to discuss the tool and share our thinking with others focused on business-nonprofit partnerships at an event co-hosted by the White House, Points of Light’s Billion + Change, and the US Department of Commerce where we found many others similarly interested in better articulating the value that each contributes to a collaboration. Now we are curious to hear your perspective: What kinds of contributions have you seen corporations and social sector organizations bring to a partnership? Do you view reach, assets, reputation, and capabilities as important aspects of a partnership, or are there other kinds of value that you would prioritize over these four?

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/05/29/the-value-exchange-tool-building-business-nonprofit-partnerships-that-last/feed/08 common innovation trapshttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/05/08/8-common-innovation-traps/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/05/08/8-common-innovation-traps/#commentsFri, 08 May 2015 21:27:56 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2718Innovation, it seems, is easier said than done. Despite growing interest in applying innovation methodologies to social sector challenges over the past decade, more often than not, philanthropic efforts to support innovation fall short.

That’s because the processes, strategies, and structures that funders need to deliberately seek out and support innovation are often quite different from the ones they use for traditional grantmaking—a lesson many funders learn the hard way.

In our SSIR article “The Re-Emerging Art of Funding Innovation” last year, we highlighted many specific approaches that innovation funders are now using. But we find that many grantmakers still end up falling into one or more “innovation traps”—common mistakes that can prevent them from succeeding as they try to find and fund breakthrough social change.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/05/08/8-common-innovation-traps/feed/0Wicked problems are being recast as wicked opportunitieshttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/04/29/wicked-problems-are-being-recast-as-wicked-opportunities/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/04/29/wicked-problems-are-being-recast-as-wicked-opportunities/#commentsWed, 29 Apr 2015 16:11:49 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2712I want to talk to you about “wickedness”–but not the kind of wickedness you’re thinking. Since the 1960s, we’ve had a term to describe public health crises like malaria—and also rising crime, climate change, joblessness, and other persistent ills. They are “wicked problems.” Wickedness isn’t a degree of sheer difficulty. It means the problem springs from many diverse sources, is emergent and shifting, and will never have one right answer.

We’re seeing a trend by which many kinds of “wicked problems”—complex, dynamic, and seemingly intractable social challenges—are being reframed and attacked with renewed vigor through solution ecosystems. Unprecedented networks of nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, health professionals, governments, and international development institutions—and yes, businesses—are coalescing around them, and recasting them as wicked opportunities.

To support our case we examine a variety of deep-seated problems, ranging from malaria to obesity to water stewardship and outline a framework for building the problem solving ecosystems necessary to turn these kinds of wicked problems into wicked opportunities.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the article and would also encourage you to explore some of the other thought provoking pieces in the report which explore the multiple dimensions of solution ecosystems.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2015/04/29/wicked-problems-are-being-recast-as-wicked-opportunities/feed/2New research: how companies are successfully building sustainability and inclusivity into the heart of their business practiceshttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/10/16/new-research-how-companies-are-successfully-building-sustainability-and-inclusivity-into-the-heart-of-their-business-practices/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/10/16/new-research-how-companies-are-successfully-building-sustainability-and-inclusivity-into-the-heart-of-their-business-practices/#commentsThu, 16 Oct 2014 18:18:34 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2707For many years, economic growth in emerging markets has outpaced the development of state and civil society institutions, giving rise to political, social and environmental challenges. But where companies once viewed these challenges as issues to ameliorate through corporate philanthropy, today many of these challenges pose immediate threats to companies’ expansion and long-term success. This is now the case in both the emerging and mature markets that offer the most promising growth opportunities.

Consider the case of Yum! Brands. It derived about half of its revenues from China and faced a sharp decline in 2013 in the Chinese market because of an antibiotics scare in the local poultry supply chain. The company’s ability to grow in additional markets also ran into barriers: for example, the growth of its KFC franchise in sub-Saharan Africa was capped by the lack of local modernized poultry farming practices.

Or, take the cases of Coca Cola and Nike. Both companies found that their global growth opportunities were at risk of being severely affected by environmental and climatic changes. Droughts, more unpredictable weather patterns, and more frequent major floods are threats to Coca Cola’s supply of key ingredients – such as sugar cane, sugar beets and citrus for its fruit juices – sourced from agricultural sectors highly dependent on natural water supplies. Similarly, Nike has had to contend with factory shutdowns due to floods in Asia.

These businesses cannot afford to wait for governments, grassroots enterprises, or civil society to fix the problem; nor can they rely on prevailing business-as-usual practices to automatically overcome or resolve them. Businesses must actively find ways to reinforce the contexts that support the very markets they need for sustaining their growth aspirations. With emerging markets accounting for two-thirds of global GDP growth over the past decade and about 40% of current global output, investing in “contextual strength” is becoming an essential business need.

That context has given rise to a new wave of growth in sustainable and inclusive business activities, which we abbreviate as SIBA. But as much as the adoption of SIBA has grown, it has a long ways to go. That was the motivation for Monitor Institute to partner with Citi Foundation and the Fletcher School at Tufts to do new primary research into what motivates companies to engage in SIBA, what challenges they face, and what philanthropy can do to help advance and spread these essential changes in how business is done.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/10/16/new-research-how-companies-are-successfully-building-sustainability-and-inclusivity-into-the-heart-of-their-business-practices/feed/0In case you missed it: our perspective on the importance of foundation innovationhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/09/26/in-case-you-missed-it-our-perspective-on-the-importance-of-foundation-innovation/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/09/26/in-case-you-missed-it-our-perspective-on-the-importance-of-foundation-innovation/#commentsFri, 26 Sep 2014 21:19:42 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2699We’ve been heartened by the warm response to our piece about the importance of supporting innovation, which SSIR ran as its cover story in February. To continue the conversation, we wrote up additional thoughts in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which ran in early August and was the newspaper’s most-read article on the day it came out. Just in case you missed it–easy to do in today’s blizzard of social media–here it is again. Stay tuned for further thoughts from us later in the year, as we continue digging in to the importance of taking risks in philanthropy and what it means to be effective as an innovation funder.

Philanthropy’s innovative spirit—one of its hallmarks for more than a century—has yielded breakthroughs as far ranging as the 911 emergency system, public libraries, and the human-genome project.

But ironically, at a time when the buzz about innovation couldn’t be greater and emerging technologies and scientific advances are now allowing us to approach social problems in entirely new ways, many foundations are actually beginning to shy away from high-risk, high-reward projects. As the movement toward “strategic philanthropy”—with its focus on calculating impact—has gained traction over the last decade, many grant makers are looking for safe investments, essentially subcontracting to established organizations to provide clear, measurable, and predesignated results.

This approach can yield tremendous results in areas in which the existing solutions are already known. Yet for many of the toughest problems we now face, simply investing in incremental improvements and proven approaches will not be enough. We need to experiment and find new solutions that have the potential to create transformative change. And while government must answer to voters and businesses to their shareholders, philanthropy remains one of the only sources of flexible risk capital for the public good.

Over the last several years, a small group of foundations has begun to reintroduce innovation into their grant making, opening themselves up to explore new strategies and recognizing that the process of innovation requires flexibility, iteration, and failure.

Through nearly a decade of work with these types of innovative foundations, we and our colleagues have looked not just at the “why” of funding innovation but also at the “how.” And while it remains more art than science, we’ve identified two goals that grant makers should focus on in sparking innovation:

Transformation: As Eric Toone, the former principal deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s experimental Advanced Research Projects Agency, puts it, “When you’re doing innovation, the first question is not ‘Is this going to work?’ but rather ‘If it works, would it matter?’?”

Experimentation: Problems like entrenched poverty and climate change rarely have clear and technical solutions, so we need to find and test new approaches, which can require trial and error and challenging old assumptions.

Injecting greater transformation and experimentation into philanthropy, however, is easier said than done. But we have found that seeking out and supporting breakthrough innovation differs from more traditional grant making in five key aspects of the philanthropic process:

Finding new ideas. Uncovering ideas with the potential to create transformation means reaching beyond the “usual suspects” to scout for promising new solutions. The Rockefeller Foundation, for example, is building networks of “searchlight partners”—grantees who report back from the front lines about the latest trends and opportunities and serve as an advance sensing mechanism to help identify new problems and solutions as they emerge.

Selecting new ideas. Because innovation funding is rooted in taking risks on less-proven approaches, funding decisions must balance rigorous analysis with trusting individual intuition about a project’s potential for transformative change. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenges Explorations program, for instance, allows an idea to receive initial funding with the strong support of just one “champion” from its panel of experts.

Supporting innovation. Organizations that fund innovation often need to provide more hands-on support to help guide early-stage ideas from concept to adoption. The California Healthcare Foundation, for example, hosts events at which recipients present early prototypes to doctors and low-income patients so they can get critical early feedback on new approaches from the people who will use them.

Measuring progress. Successful innovations often follow a long and circuitous path. They need to be careful not to mistake wrong turns for roadblocks, so organizations like the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation have begun to embrace developmental evaluation approaches that promote testing and continuous improvement rather than the judgment of success or failure.

Expanding what works. Starting small makes sense for getting innovative ideas off the ground, but foundations often need to help expand successful programs by developing partnerships that help build expertise and growth capital.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio, for example, has helped grantees attract additional capital from sources ranging from government agencies to private investors.

In many cases, it’s too early to know whether these approaches will bear fruit. But they represent an important counterbalance for grant makers at a time when the pendulum of strategic philanthropy may be swinging too far in the direction of certainty, safety, and control.

This isn’t to say that innovation funding should somehow replace strategic philanthropy. On the contrary: Innovation funding is an essential part of strategic philanthropy.

Just as financial investors seek to maintain a diversified portfolio—placing the majority of their assets in investments with safe and steady returns and using a smaller fraction for higher-risk opportunities with the potential to produce outsize rewards—foundations, too, should consider using a portion of their resources to support breakthrough innovation.

What’s the “right” balance?

While there’s no single answer, Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, has provided some insight on this subject with what he refers to as his 70/20/10 rule for managing innovation. He contends that 70 percent of an organization’s resources should be dedicated to core business tasks, 20 percent toward new projects related to the core business, and 10 percent to more radical new businesses.
These figures may or may not be right for foundations, but they nevertheless remind us of the importance of finding a balance between supporting traditional programs and funding innovative ones. Because if we want to find breakthroughs to tackle today’s most intractable public problems, philanthropy will likely need to look beyond incremental sure things. Foundations will also need to figure out how to re-embrace the upside of risk and innovation.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/09/26/in-case-you-missed-it-our-perspective-on-the-importance-of-foundation-innovation/feed/0New insights into the craft of incentive prize designhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/06/24/new-insights-into-the-craft-of-incentive-prize-design/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/06/24/new-insights-into-the-craft-of-incentive-prize-design/#commentsTue, 24 Jun 2014 23:06:41 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2694Prize competitions increasingly serve as a creative mechanism for foundation and government leaders to engage the public, drive innovation and pay for results. In a new report, my co-authors and I at Doblin (the innovation practice of Deloitte Consulting LLP) explore how governments and philanthropies can solve public sector problems through the use of incentive prizes. The report, The Craft of Prize Design: Lessons from the Public Sector offers the most exhaustive exploration yet completed of incentive prizes within and around the public sector and provides new trend data, practical design guidance, and case studies that can be applied to the public, nonprofit and philanthropic sectors.

This report was generously supported by six leading U.S. foundations who work to promote innovation and efficiency in and around the public sector. Their goal was to provide an up-to-date, comprehensive guide to prize design, in order for prospective prize managers to have access to the necessary resources for their efforts to be as effective as possible. These foundations include Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Case Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation. In addition, my co-authors and I liaised with leadership from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as the Obama Administration has taken steps to accelerate public-sector adoption of prize competitions as a tool to spur innovation and solve tough problems, as part of President Obama’s Strategy for American Innovation.

The Craft of Prize Design features three important contributions to the growing body of information about prizes. Using quantitative and qualitative analysis, it characterizes six of the most important outcomes that prizes designers try to achieve through the use of various incentives. It also highlights the elements of prize design, the fundamental ingredients of all prizes that are necessary to achieve particular outcomes. Finally, the report provides practical guidance for prize designers, so that they can learn how to combine the elements of prize design to achieve the outcomes that they desire.

In the last four years, the Federal Government has engaged citizen solvers in more than 350 prize competitions from more than 50 federal agencies and departments. U.S. philanthropies are also designing and launching sophisticated prizes in increasing numbers to tackle different types of challenges – from strengthening communities to encouraging more sustainable energy consumption to cultivating innovative solutions from city governments.

Prizes are powerful tools for innovation because they incent a diversity of individuals or organizations to cooperate with each other and compete against each other to solve hard problems. If effectively designed, prizes can create bold, transformative results. For example, while prizes have long been used to develop ideas, technologies, products, or services, recent competitions have focused on creating new economic opportunities and stimulating markets. For instance, the MIT Clean Energy Prize, which includes the U.S. Department of Energy as a sponsor, is a national student business plan competition that helps turn clean energy ideas into successful businesses. The prize awarded a $1 million purse to winning teams and helped to expand the clean energy market by attracting $85 million in capital and research grants for competition participants.

Public sector leaders are also increasingly using prizes to engage people, organizations, and communities in bold transformation and behavioral change. An excellent illustration of this trend is the Rebuild by Design challenge administered by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which mobilized a community of leading engineering, architecture, and design firms, as well as highly regarded research institutions from around the world, to develop scalable, resilient design solutions for rebuilding communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy. The challenge was named one of CNN’s 10 Best Ideas of 2013.

We wrote the report to be a practical guide for public sector leaders who wish to take the plunge and build their own prizes. For the first time, leaders who want to drive innovation can now access the collective wisdom of experienced prize designers in the public and philanthropic sectors.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/06/24/new-insights-into-the-craft-of-incentive-prize-design/feed/2Strategic philanthropy is smart but not wisehttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/05/22/strategic-philanthropy-is-smart-but-not-wise/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/05/22/strategic-philanthropy-is-smart-but-not-wise/#commentsThu, 22 May 2014 14:59:55 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2689The Summer 2014 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review contained updated perspective on strategic philanthropy, “Strategic Philanthropy for a Complex World.” Katherine Fulton’s response to the piece was published on the website alongside seven others.

Strategic philanthropy is smart but not wise. That is why so many seasoned social change leaders have voiced doubts about it, publicly and privately, since it gained prominence and adherents. Peel away the theory the authors now expound, and what you have is praiseworthy common sense. Their argument is both well articulated and overdue.

That said, knowing what to do and being able to do it are two fundamentally different things. The approach outlined here only hints at what will be required to implement it, as our work over the past decade at Monitor Institute has taught us.

Strategic philanthropy has rightly aspired to intellectual rigor about the “what” and the “why” of social change, rejecting vague claims and a reliance on good intentions. But the hard-earned wisdom of practice reveals that lasting change nearly always relies on mastery of the “how” and the “who,” regardless whether the problem is simple, complicated, or complex. The human system, therefore, is as important as the problemsystem, as John Kania, Mark Kramer, and Patty Russell acknowledge in their article. That might seem obvious, but designing an approach that honors this insight is incredibly hard to do well in any environment, and especially within the staffing and governance constraints that are typical in foundations.

Let’s take the author’s central example as a case in point: the Rockefeller Foundation impact investing initiative. As it happens, I led the Monitor Institute team that supported Antony Bugg-Levine, Judith Rodin, and others at Rockefeller as their strategy emerged, ultimately leading to the formation of the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), where I served on the board with Antony until recently.

Any case example must be short. In this case, however, the broader narrative cloaks as much as it reveals. Here are two quick additions to illustrate what success will require:

Rockefeller had a strategy. It just didn’t have a very precise strategic plan. (For more on the differences between the two, see “The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy,” by Dana O’Donovan and Noah Rimland Flower, SSIR, Jan. 10, 2013.) Bugg-Levine and his team created strong hypotheses based on research and the insights of well-designed strategic conversations. The rigor paid off. Trusting emergence does not mean relaxing intellectual standards, or simply improvising. It does mean remaining open to testing not only your precise solutions, but your understanding of the problem you are addressing as well. As you experiment, you learn about the problem system, which may force you to question whether you have even articulated the right goal, or misjudged what it will take to succeed. Time and again, this is what our clients are learning—and the lesson runs counter to strategic philanthropy’s central thrust. Transformative social change requires confronting messy political, social, and human realities, with a strong tolerance for ambiguity and a keen eye for the dynamic contextual forces that can be harnessed for your ends. That’s why many of us are busy creating tools, concepts, and approaches to replace or supplement logic models while boosting strategic learning.

If the aspiration is to make change, not just grants, foundations must seek out and then empower a particular type of leader who works close to the front lines. In the impact investing case, Bugg-Levine and his team knitted a new community together across lines of sector, geography, and issue, encouraging and cajoling them into aligning their actions in crucial ways. This work was incredibly time-consuming and required unusual skill, both in building relationships and adapting on the fly as conditions changed. Bugg-Levine had the freedom to do that work because Rockefeller’s leaders had the courage to take risks and to trust him. Will foundations have the courage to invest in and trust the leaders who have the knowledge, networks, and skills to drive a change agenda—whether they work directly for the foundation or not? Unless they do, the theory espoused in this essay will remain just that—a theory.

Change cannot be controlled. It can’t be distilled into a recipe that anyone can follow. That is clearly one of the lessons of strategic philanthropy’s evolution so far. We must learn to work together in new ways to guide and cultivate change—to master sensibilities and skills that remain too rare in philanthropy today.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/05/22/strategic-philanthropy-is-smart-but-not-wise/feed/0How emerging-market growth is turning business leaders into to social problem-solvershttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/04/21/how-emerging-market-growth-is-turning-business-leaders-into-to-social-problem-solvers/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/04/21/how-emerging-market-growth-is-turning-business-leaders-into-to-social-problem-solvers/#commentsTue, 22 Apr 2014 05:34:38 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2680Growth will involve engaging with the social needs and complexities of emerging and frontier markets. These issues are no longer just the government’s responsibility, or purely philanthropic efforts. This is the contention of our recently-released section in Deloitte Consulting’s Business Trends 2014: Navigating the Next Wave of Globalization.

Throughout the developing world, water, sanitation, and hygiene are matters of life and death. Every 20 seconds, a child under five dies from a waterborne illness. Eighty percent of diseases are related to contaminated water, and more than 780 million people do not have access to clean drinking water.

Unilever has ambitious goals to address these problems: By 2020, it wants to bring safe drinking water to half a billion people around the world and help improve the hygiene habits of twice as many. It established hand-washing education programs in 16 countries, reaching 11 million in Africa alone, and now works with the Millennium Villages Project to develop more scalable water, sanitation, and hygiene interventions.

Unilever’s actions are not philanthropy; they are key elements of the company’s global business strategy. Fifty-five percent of Unilever’s global revenue now comes from emerging markets. Its CEO Paul Polman declares, “We cannot thrive as a business in a world where… nearly 1 billion go to bed hungry every night, 2.8 billion are short of water and increasing numbers of people are excluded from the opportunity to work.” Unilever’s Lifebuoy soap has experienced double-digit growth, in part as a result of the company’s education campaign, and it is one of Unilever’s fastest-growing brands.

This is the new face of corporate social performance in the next wave of globalization. Companies operating in emerging markets must address the challenges of serving low-income consumers and rural communities, and must adapt to the limitations that impede commerce. The prospects are exciting—look out for a period of experimentation and innovation as organizations advance their core business objectives by addressing existing social and environmental issues.

There has been increasing interest around the world in the role that inclusive businesses, which engage and benefit the global poor, can play in the fight against the problems of poverty. However, disappointingly few of these have achieved the scale required to make a significant difference. An analysis of over 400 such firms in Africa showed that a mere 13% of them had begun to scale. Now, in Beyond the Pioneer: Getting Inclusive Industries to Scale, our colleagues at Monitor Inclusive Markets share new findings that explain why this is the case, along with recommendations for how these problems can be overcome. Their new report:

Describes the key scaling barriers that lie both within and outside the firm, and explains why they often cannot be resolved by the firms themselves

Spotlights the crucial role played by industry facilitators that are typically not themselves market participants but help to resolve key scaling barriers to the benefit of whole industries, not just single firms

Analyses historical and on-going cases where such business models are scaling or have scaled, to better understand the principles and practices that underpin effective industry facilitation

Explains that new risks that emerge even after scale has been achieved, and explores the challenge of mitigating those risks and sustaining scale (and impact)

Beyond the Pioneer is the culmination of a year of in-depth research into cases of industry facilitation and growth across Asia and Africa, in a range of sectors including financial services, energy, agribusiness and healthcare. It also draws on Monitor Deloitte’s own experience of developing market-based solutions to poverty on the ground in India, in sectors such as housing and safe water.

We hope you find this new work of interest, and look forward to hearing your thoughts and reactions.

This work has been made possible by the support of Omidyar Network, The MasterCard Foundation, Shell Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Global Impact Investing Network / Department for International Development (UK), The Rockefeller Foundation, United States Agency for International Development, and The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

As philanthropy has gotten more strategic over the last decade, many foundations have begun to lose their appetite for risk and experimentation. But a small number of funders have begun to intentionally seek out and support high-risk, high-reward innovations with the potential to truly transform our most intractable social challenges.

In our recent article, “The Re-Emerging Art of Funding Innovation,” we explore the processes and practices used by these “innovation funders” and look at how funding breakthrough innovation differs from more traditional grantmaking approaches. The article is the cover story for the just-released Spring issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and can be found here on their site.

In the article, we share a process for intentionally injecting two interrelated innovation principles — transformation and experimentation — into philanthropic processes and systems in order to bring a greater degree of risk-taking, openness, and flexibility into funders’ work.

Although these approaches often take a different shape within each institution, innovation can typically be introduced at five different stages of the funding process: sourcing, selecting, supporting, measuring, and scaling. The article shares a series of stories illustrating what these activities look like in practice.

While a formal innovation strategy requires thoughtful choices around structures, processes, networks, culture, and many other considerations, there are some simple ways that funders can begin to embed innovation principles in their work. Here are a few steps that a foundation could take to get started:

1. Make deliberate out-of-strategy grants. Dedicate 10 percent of your grantmaking budget to support projects that seem promising but don’t fit neatly into your strategy. Each quarter, hold a meeting to discuss what has been learned from this “out-of-strategy” grantmaking and how it could influence the rest of your work.

2. Ask your grantees. Grant recipients bring a perspective on the field very different from foundation staff’s. Solicit ideas from your grantees about emerging ideas and who is doing work that is pushing the envelope.

3. Assess your portfolio. Review your grantmaking portfolio, giving each grant a subjective score for its level of risk and its potential for reward. Plot the results on a graph and have a conversation with your board or other stakeholders to discuss whether you are taking enough risks and what type of balance between risk and reward feels appropriate.

4. Tap into your network. Select a small, informal group of advisors and every six months ask them to tell you about the most interesting new ideas that they’re seeing and whether the ideas are a fit for your grantmaking or not.

5. Use your special opportunity fund. Many foundations have a fund that is used to support pet projects from board members and other ad hoc requests. Use a portion of that fund to explore a new area that is tangential to your primary strategies but shows potential. Think of it as a “sensing” or “search” mechanism for finding new issues you may address in the future.

6. Host an innovation contest. Hold a conversation with staff about how they define innovation and then run a contest to identify one or two grantees that the staff feels are most innovative. Provide the winner(s) with a small flexible grant to encourage the behavior.

7. Bring in a futurist. There are many experts who look ahead and try to see and understand trends and patterns as they emerge. Invite one of these forward thinkers in to talk with your board or staff to see if they prompt new thinking.

8. Follow provocative thinkers. Find ten people who are exploring new concepts and approaches and follow them via Twitter or blog posts, cataloging the ideas they mention. Then host a discussion among staff or board members to see what new thinking the ideas might prompt.

We hope that these activities are helpful starting points as you seek potentially transformative solutions in your work. We welcome your thoughts and reactions and would encourage you to share this message with others who are working to fund more innovative ideas.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/03/10/the-re-emerging-art-of-funding-innovation/feed/0Collaboration above the fray: designing strategic conversations that matterhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/01/29/collaboration-above-the-fray-designing-strategic-conversations-that-matter/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/01/29/collaboration-above-the-fray-designing-strategic-conversations-that-matter/#commentsThu, 30 Jan 2014 01:20:01 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2645“Systemic challenges can’t be solved by visionary leaders alone. They require creative collaboration among colleagues with different roles and perspectives. They require strategic conversations that get above the fray of daily concerns and narrow self-interest to focus on longer-term priorities and collective purpose.”

That’s the core contention of our long-time colleagues Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon in a new book/toolkit combination called Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change. Here’s a Rorschach test: are they talking about strategic conversation within a single organization or the conversation necessary to catalyze collective action among many? For leaders in social change, it’s both—which is why this work is a must-read.

The problem that Ertel and Solomon set out to solve is the plague of “okay” strategic conversations that afflict all organizations—conversations that might not be a total disaster but just don’t do much. Strategic conversations that are merely okay can undermine confidence in an organization’s leadership in the short term and over time can lead to bad decisions that can lead to wasted resources, lost opportunities, and sometimes even total failure.

It’s easy to understand why the bar is set so low. First, they note, strategy has gotten harder at the same time as it’s gotten more important. Steady-as-you-go strategic planning has fallen by the wayside in our increasingly volatile and uncertain times. This shift is clearly felt in the social sector as evidenced by the strong response to our short piece on the topic last year. Second, many professionals don’t get trained in the critical leadership skill set of strategic conversation.

Ertel and Solomon argue that we can and must do better. They offer core principles and key practices for designing strategic conversations that generate breakthrough insights by combining the best ideas of those from different backgrounds and perspectives. Such conversations can lift participants above the fray of daily concerns and narrow self-interest, reconnecting them to their greater, collective purpose. And they create deep, lasting impacts that propel organizations and networks forward.

This book isn’t just about how to run a decent meeting. Well-designed strategic conversations differ from a well-organized meeting in five key respects:

Some of the points above might ring a bell if you’re familiar with our 2013 guidebook GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Convening, which was strongly influenced by Ertel and Solomon’s research. Where GATHER focuses specifically on multi-stakeholder convenings with a goal of social problem-solving, Moments of Impact offers a toolkit that is more broadly applicable across sectors and purposes, making the two pieces good companions. While many of the examples in Moments of Impact are from business, the book includes examples from actors focused on social change, such as Rockefeller Foundation and the De LaSalle Christian Brothers educational order.

Moments of Impact is packed with valuable lessons and tools for any professional looking to effect change in their organization and beyond. For more, including the introduction and opening chapter, see www.momentsofimpactbook.com.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2014/01/29/collaboration-above-the-fray-designing-strategic-conversations-that-matter/feed/0Let the scaffolding fallhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/11/12/let-the-scaffolding-fall/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/11/12/let-the-scaffolding-fall/#commentsTue, 12 Nov 2013 19:15:39 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2422This post was written as a response to the new report “Impact Investing 2.0,” and was first published on the report’s micro-site.

Make no mistake: the new research reported in “Impact Investing 2.0” is a significant contribution. We applaud it, even though the authors take direct aim at some of the concepts of “Impact Investing 1.0” we helped create.

In our widely distributed and discussed January 2009 report, “Investing for Social & Environmental Impact: A Design for Catalyzing an Emerging Industry,” we argued that impact investing was in the midst of a messy transition from the uncoordinated innovations underway for decades in disconnected fields such as community development and microfinance. We laid out a path for rapidly creating a much larger, coherent and integrated marketplace characterized by disciplined investment and high standards for impact. “The pressing question,” we wrote, “is whether impact investing will remain a small disorganized, underleveraged niche for years or even decades to come—or whether leaders will come together to fulfill the industry’s clear promise…”

The subsequent years have taught us all a great deal.

Among the lessons: learning what can be sped up, and what cannot. The idea of impact investing caught fire more quickly, and spread more widely, than we had imagined possible. But the practice has proved even more difficult and complex than we had foreseen. (The global financial crisis didn’t help.) Investing well is hard, whether or not with the intention of impact. Getting results from impact investments takes time. That’s why this new research, focused on the actual practice and performance of 12 funds, is so important. As our friend Paul Saffo puts it, “Never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”

Our work established the language of “impact first” and “financial first” as a way to understand different types of impact investors during the messy transition then underway. We believe that pulling apart investing in this way served a purpose in 2008-2009, since it pointed to the different paths practitioners would follow and the different mindsets, tools and training that then governed practice. We aimed to find a way to invite practitioners to start from where they were—but to move toward each other, and learn.

In retrospect, we can see that these ideas may have been like the necessary “scaffolding” that must go up as something new is built. Then, as progress is made, that scaffolding can fall away, having served its purpose. We are certainly ready to believe that “impact first” and “financial first” was scaffolding that served a purpose and should now fall away, to be replaced by “the mission first and last” principle asserted in “Impact Investing 2.0.”

That said, we believe this transition will continue to proceed slowly. The necessary “multilingual” leadership” cited in “Impact Investing 2.0” is currently a huge capability gap that will not be easily filled. The traditional “bifurcation” is bred deeply within the leaders who control institutions today (whether financial or philanthropic), and the younger generation who reject this bifurcation will have to earn their spurs through long practice. While the market is moving to a blended definition of success, the skills needed to succeed are often lacking, and rarely all live in one organization, let alone within one individual. Building multilingual cultures, institution by institution, will take will and skill. Too often, both are lacking in those who have real power today. That is why we believe that partnership and collaboration will grow in importance—as leaders pursue the “catalytic capital” strategies outlined in “Impact Investing 2.0.” In fact, skill in what we call “aligned action” is likely to be an essential pillar of the leadership needed.

Impact investing has taken off as a concept precisely because terrific leaders have stepped forward–not least the authors of this report. The leadership task ahead – building the successes, the practices, the policies, the needed infrastructure – is daunting but exciting. That is why impact investing is becoming the life’s work of so many experienced and emerging leaders.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/11/12/let-the-scaffolding-fall/feed/0Collaborative technologies: reducing the friction in the systemhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/11/07/collaborative-technologies-reducing-the-friction-in-the-system/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/11/07/collaborative-technologies-reducing-the-friction-in-the-system/#commentsThu, 07 Nov 2013 21:30:28 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2413Earlier today, Monitor Institute and the Foundation Center released a new report called Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better. As part of the research, we looked at more than 170 different technological tools now available to funders, dove deeply into the literature on philanthropic collaboration, analyzed the results of recent Foundation Center surveys, and spoke with a wide range of experts from the worlds of both technology and philanthropy.

The report’s main headlines won’t come as a huge surprise to anyone: (1) more than ever before, funders are recognizing that they will need to collaborate to effectively to address the complex, intractable problems that we now face, and (2) new technologies—from simple group scheduling tools to comprehensive online collaboration workspaces—are now available to help facilitate the often challenging process of working together.

But there’s a deeper story beneath the headlines: about how these emerging technologies are enabling new types collaborations that weren’t possible (or at least much were more difficult) just a few years ago.

While much of the talk about collaboration these days centers on large, formal “collective impact” initiatives and “needle-moving” collaboratives, these types of highly intensive collaborative approaches aren’t necessarily right for all funders, all situations, and all purposes. In some cases, funders are simply looking to learn together. In others, they’re just aiming to understand the broader ecosystem of activity so they can act independently but still align their efforts with those of others.

New technologies are changing the playing field and making it cheaper and easier than ever before to facilitate these different types of “lower-intensity” collaborative activities. New collaborative platforms are helping funders share files and information, and can provide important forums for ongoing dialogue and conversation. Online project management systems are streamlining processes for coordinating and aligning action. And new tools for aggregating data and visualizing information now allow funders to see the larger funding landscape that they are a part of in new ways.

These simpler, technology-facilitated collaborative activities may not yield the outsized results of more complex, formal efforts, but they often produce very real improvements and outcomes, while also helping to build relationships and momentum that can build towards higher-intensity efforts.

The Harnessing Collaborative Technologies report helps readers make sense of the dizzying array of technologies that are now available to help those engaged in both low- and high-intensity collaborations by parsing the different collaborative needs of funders. How can new tools help funders learn and get smarter about the issues they care about? How can the technologies help you find and connect with potential partners? How can they help you transact business together? Which technologies can help you assess collective progress and measure outcomes? The report encourages funders to start with these collaborative needs rather than with the technologies themselves, to ensure that solutions fit the wants, requirements, and limitations of users.

Harnessing Collaborative Technologies also provides a set of principles that offer guidance for tool developers and funders about how to make thoughtful choices when investing in the creation and adaptation of new tools that facilitate collaborative work.

By getting smarter about how we develop and use these collaborative tools, we have an opportunity to alleviate some of the “friction in the system” that has made working together—even in lower intensity ways—difficult until now. And in doing so, we can ease the path to collaboration and help aggregate resources and effort that can match the scale of the problems we now face.

During his presentation at this week’s Council of Foundations Conference for Community Foundations, Monitor Institute’s Gabriel Kasper talked about the need for innovation in community philanthropy. This included a call to examine orthodoxy in our organizations and communities, that is, the behaviors and procedures that we often take for granted with respect to the way we go about our business. This notion of orthodoxy was developed by the innovation firm Doblin and is further outlined in an article in Rotman Magazine. Gabriel then encouraged attendees to, essentially, “steal like an artist.” So in that spirit, I wanted to share the plenary exercise he had participants go through that I am particularly interested in bringing to some of the networks with which I work:

Identify an orthodoxy in your organization or community life. (Examples: We make grants. The community comes to us. We lead by being out in front. Money is our important asset.)

Ask yourself if this orthodoxy still holds true. Does it align with intended purpose and/or mission?

What might it look like if this orthodoxy were flipped? Do you know others who are challenging that orthodoxy? (Examples: We do advocacy. We go to the community. We lead by getting behind others. Impact is our most important asset.)

Gabriel had everyone write answers to these questions quickly on cards and then “play” them at their table. The table then voted on the one orthodoxy that the table felt most compelled to challenge.

Any orthodoxies come to mind that you would like to flip?

(Want to stay informed about Monitor Institute’s initiative on the future of community philanthropy? Join the mailing list.)

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/10/04/flipping-orthodoxy/feed/1The five stages of social innovation at scalehttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/09/02/the-five-stages-of-social-innovation-at-scale/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/09/02/the-five-stages-of-social-innovation-at-scale/#commentsMon, 02 Sep 2013 11:00:29 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2383This post is the sixth (and final) in a series published by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

We’ve learned a lot from our work helping large-scale nonprofits find ways to create social innovation at scale. As we’ve explored in the last five posts, we’ve helped them reconnect with their core purpose and realign their network around shared goals, and in the process, we’ve worked with them to reinvent their organizations, business models and brands. Looking across all of these cases, our single most important lesson learned is that this work is most effective when approached holistically, because every part of the system is interconnected. If you fix only a nonprofit’s strategy but don’t realign the organization around new goals for impact (including structure, talent, and governance), the new strategy has a poor chance of being implemented. If you tinker with the structure without establishing a north star, the nonprofit will be held back by its lack of strategic focus. If you help the group do better tactical fundraising without increased and sustained social impact, financial improvement will be short-lived. And, if you only tinker with an organization’s “brand promise,” you’re helping the nonprofit sell something that it can’t deliver on, and clients and supporters will quickly become disillusioned. All of these pieces need to be updated and changed together.

Here’s what we’ve learned about theprocess of transforming these legacy nonprofits to achieve greater impact at scale:

Diagnose the organization or network holistically. The process should begin with a holistic diagnosis:which pieces of the organization and or network are most in need of fixing? Is the group still having impact, and is its impact still relevant? How could that impact be expanded or updated? How is its organizational health: its structure, its leadership, its talent, and its governance model? How healthy is its business model? And what about its brand—is it current and relevant, or does it reflect an outdated vision from decades past?

Identify a new vision and strategy for impact: Many nonprofits still have a north star within them, but the light has diminished over time, covered over by layers of lower-impact activities. Finding that light takes an ability to both reconnect with historic purpose and reimagine the organization potential in the current era. Sometimes the light is distributed across “bright spots” within the organization’s network: small examples of programs and approaches that are working well but aren’t yet widespread.That light can then be used to identify what it will take for the organization to move from here to there and devise a change strategy for making the journey.

Realign the organization around the strategy: Once the strategy is set, the nonprofit then needs to assess its organizational capabilities and fix what is broken or missing. This can include redesigning the relationship of national headquarters with its field or affiliates, restructuring at the top, hiring new talent, building new capabilities, or even changing the governance model. The list will vary from organization to organization. No matter what, focus on the highest-priority items and develop a roadmap that phases the work over several years rather than trying to change everything at once.

Design a system-wide change process. You have to include representative parts of the system in the process to see points of connection, identify pain points, and create buy-in for proposed changes. Change can’t always be mandated, so broad stakeholder engagement and bottom-up input is critical, such as from local affiliates and end beneficiaries. This is especially true for federated groups and membership organizations. As with all change processes, the leader should plan for quick wins and sequence adoption in “waves” throughout the organization. If the nonprofit is a large, decentralized network (a federated model) the group needs to figure out whether to cascade the change out from headquarters to the affiliates versus horizontally, with some affiliates acting as early adopters and influencing others.

Lead, communicate, and engage. Change is hard, and given the chance, most stakeholders will slip back into the comfortable status quo. Leadership of this process is critical and should come from many places. The CEO has to keep the organization focused on why they are doing this and create the hunger to make real changes. The board should also champion and communicate the why and the how. And leaders of affiliates should enroll and engage their local constituencies. Leadership at all levels of the system is important, as is constant communication and engagement. In fact, where we’ve seen this approach fail is when there is lack of concerted, aligned, shared, and sustained leadership for change at the board, executive, and affiliate levels.

Innovation is often described as new solutions to old problems, but those new solutions need not live only in new organizations. In fact, we think there is great potential in looking for other avenues to scale social impact, both through aligned action across many organizations and through innovation at scale that helps large nonprofits innovate and adapt to increase their impact. While it is still early days for the transformation efforts at the large nonprofits we’ve described in this series, the early signs give us great hope. We have found this work hard but rewarding, and we see reason to believe that many other established nonprofits can achieve similar results—provided they are willing to be clear-eyed about their current situation, address their problems holistically, and embrace significant change. As more of these efforts demonstrate increased impact, we look forward to the day when our sector is as excited about supporting the efforts of these leaders to innovate existing models as we are about supporting the next new startup.

Thisseries was developed by Heather McLeod Grant, founder of McLeod-Grant Advisors, while she was a consultant with Monitor Institute. She would like to thank the Monitor Institute team for their contributions to the writing and analysis.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/09/02/the-five-stages-of-social-innovation-at-scale/feed/0Tackling changing markets with Enterprise Community Partnershttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/26/tackling-changing-markets-with-enterprise-community-partners/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/26/tackling-changing-markets-with-enterprise-community-partners/#commentsMon, 26 Aug 2013 11:00:36 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2375This is the fifth post in a series published by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In our last post we took a close look at how UNCF found its new north star, as an example of what social innovation at scale can look like on the ground. Another example of innovating at scale is the transformation work that our team led at Enterprise Community Partners, a national nonprofit that helps produce homes affordable to lower-income families in neighborhoods connected to social and economic opportunity.

As CEO Terri Ludwig described it, urban visionary Jim Rouse and his wife Patty founded Enterprise in 1982 with the ambitious goal of helping every person in the U.S. find a decent, affordable place to call home. Over the past three decades, Enterprise has helped build or preserve more than 300,000 affordable homes, invested $14 billion into communities, and been on the forefront of federal housing policy.

In the wake of the mortgage market meltdown and the subsequent Great Recession of 2008, the housing and community development field was undergoing a significant shake-up. Sensing challenges ahead, Enterprise took a proactive step to rethink its long-term vision and strategic plan. In early 2011, they brought in Monitor Institute to help.

Like many established nonprofits, Enterprise has numerous assets: committed people, a strong footprint in local communities, national networks on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C., a trusted brand, and a history of innovative programs. However, like many nonprofits beyond the start-up phase, Enterprise knew they needed to adapt to a rapidly changing ecosystem. Monitor Institute’s mandate was to help clarify success and identify priority levers for impact, as well as help the organization become more integrated, adaptive, and faster-paced.

Thinking ahead and thinking different. To develop ideas about what a newly strengthened Enterprise could be in the decade to come, we took the leadership team through the process of imagining the different ways that the world could look in 10 years’ time and picturing the new solutions that Enterprise could then offer. That process of exploring alternative futures, picturing what success would look like, and developing new solutions helped the Enterprise team come up with new ideas for community development. As one of the participants in a scenario workshop commented, “I have worked in this sector for over 20 years, but by looking ahead the way we did, I am suddenly looking at the work we’re trying to do with fresh eyes.”

Identifying levers for change. Monitor Institute’s team worked with CEO Terri Ludwig and an integrated cross-organizational leadership team to identify several broad levers to increase impact. We settled on three: know what works via experimentation on the ground and scanning the larger field; innovate and scale time-tested approaches by bringing investment capital to fund the best models; and advocate and engage by influencing policy and developing a larger narrative around the pressing need for affordable housing. These three pillars represented the cornerstone of a new forward-looking strategy that seeks to drive impact in many different ways, through a variety of offerings and programs. The specific goals and activities underneath each of these pillars were then to be determined each year, enabling the organization to adapt and capitalize on new opportunities.

Strengthening the business model. As part of our strategy work with Enterprise, the organization kicked off an effort to further diversify its revenue sources. With traditional tax credit-related revenues under pressure on Capitol Hill, Enterprise’s leadership decided to put significant effort into developing new sources of income. We helped Enterprise in their efforts to identify new earned-income opportunities and develop of a “mission-money” matrix that would allow the team to stay on course while exploring further business opportunities.

Aligning the organization. While working on the first phase of the project, we also helped the CEO begin to identify ways in which the organization was “getting in its own way,” such as with its complicated hybrid for-profit/nonprofit structure with multiple governing boards. We helped Enterprise think through several moves that cut through its existing silos to create greater integration and overall strength. This began with consolidating and aligning a senior leadership team that had historically been split across the nonprofit and for-profit sides of the house, and continued with the development of a shared cross-organizational roadmap that was endorsed by all parts of the organization. It also included the leadership driving greater integration of its multiple boards and governance systems and changing its tax status for certain businesses, resulting in increased organizational effectiveness.

Early results: During the last year and a half, Enterprise has already begun to deliver on its strategy by launching innovative initiatives across its three levers for impact: know what works, innovate and scale, and advocate and engage. When we asked the CEO about the most important outcome of this initiative, she said: “Enterprise has always been guided by a vision: that one day every person in the U.S. has a safe, stable home. But thanks to our work with Monitor Institute, we’re honing that vision into tangible, real-world outcomes we plan to achieve both near and long-term. We now have a roadmap for the future, grounded in core beliefs and shared goals.”

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/26/tackling-changing-markets-with-enterprise-community-partners/feed/0Finding a new north star at UNCFhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/21/finding-a-new-north-star-at-uncf/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/21/finding-a-new-north-star-at-uncf/#commentsWed, 21 Aug 2013 14:00:47 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2367This is the fourth post in a series published by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In our past three posts, we’ve made the general argument for funding social innovation at scale rather than only scaling social innovation. But the real value of this work can only be understood through the individual stories of the larger-scale organizations that are now charting a new course to greater impact and newfound relevance. Monitor Institute’s work with UNCF began two years ago as an organizational transformation effort to take it from “good to great.” CEO Michael Lomax describes a long history of accomplishment at the organization: close to 70 years raising funds for member colleges, 40 years redefining the
African-American education narrative through the “A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste” campaign, and decades of government affairs work to sustain support for African-American students and historically black colleges and universities (known as HBCUs). Lomax saw it as having a well-known brand and a robust community of donors. But it was facing a number of challenges to its future success: its funders were migrating away from higher education and unrestricted giving; it was having difficulty reconciling the perspectives of various stakeholders; and, it was struggling to maintain relevance in the face of a dynamic education reform movement largely led from outside the African-American community.

Creating a roadmap for change. Several years prior to our engagement, UNCF adopted a “Three Pillar Strategy” consisting of: 1) building the capability of member colleges, 2) providing scholarship and programmatic support to students, and 3) advocacy. We conducted an in-depth organizational assessment against this strategy and identified nine areas that needed to be addressed. We found that understanding of—and support for—the three pillars was uneven across stakeholder groups, and the advocacy strategy in particular was not well defined. We also found that while UNCF had a compelling mission and vision, the overarching definition of success was dollars raised, not social impact created. Through a series of facilitated discussions and a goal-setting process, we helped UNCF define a “north star” of closing the African-American college completion gap, and prioritized all organizational initiatives based on contribution to this goal. We are now developing a dashboard to define and track metrics across the three pillars of the strategy and to connect the programmatic work to their north star.

Additionally, we focused on the “advocacy” pillar, helping UNCF develop a much broader strategy for engaging in the K-16 educational landscape both nationally and locally. UNCF has long advocated on behalf of African-American students and HBCUs, but its work focused on sustaining federal funding for HBCUs and was entirely focused on post-secondary education. We determined that this work was critical but not sufficient, given that only five percent of African-Americans test as “college ready” in all four core subjects. Without addressing the crisis in the K-12 pipeline, African-Americans will likely continue to struggle to complete college, and HBCUs will struggle to raise their graduation rates. Going forward, in addition to its existing work, UNCF will elevate awareness of the college-readiness crisis in the African-American community and make the case for change through its national media platforms. On the local level, UNCF will empower communities to drive local reform by building coalitions between community leaders and other partners, and by bringing its national and local assets to bear to drive change. UNCF has already begun piloting this local, place-based approach in New Orleans and Chicago.

Aligning the organization around the strategy. The overarching theme of our organizational work was tearing down silos and creating greater alignment among stakeholder groups. Silos existed everywhere—between headquarters and field fundraising, between corporate and institutional board members, and between internal departments. This divided structure culminated in ten senior leaders who were individually managed by the CEO. We started by tackling that challenge, first rebranding the senior staff from the “cabinet” to the “leadership team” and defining its role as managing cross-organizational collaboration. To help reset their relationships, we backed up their new goal with a leadership development curriculum that focused on building individual leadership skills and deepening trust across the team. Then we worked with the CEO and board chair on governance: first eliminating the two-tier structure that had prevented institutional directors from being full participants, then launching a new committee on development and reconstituting the strategy committee to create a forum for discussing ongoing strategic choices. Finally, we moved to the C-suite, creating an Office of the President in which the CEO leads external work, the COO manages all internal functions, and a chief of staff directs cross-organizational initiatives. These organizational changes were designed to help drive greater success in implementing the new strategy. As a result, the organization now has a high-functioning leadership structure that aligns with its new strategy.

Focusing the fundraising model. UNCF has a long history of corporate and foundation support. But the nature of philanthropy is changing, with corporate donors now using grantmaking to extend their brand strategies, and all donors placing greater emphasis on impact and results. To be more effective in this environment, nonprofits need much more sophisticated donor management tools and strong, data-driven narratives. An important piece of our fundraising work with UNCF was to develop an organization-wide, collaborative approach to developing and managing strategic donor relationships. We also strengthened fundraising effectiveness by instilling greater discipline in the design and execution of special events, prioritizing key geographies for solicitation, and defining the capabilities required to cultivate high-net-worth donors.

Early signs of success. While implementation of these initiatives at UNCF is still taking place, a number of important outcomes are already emerging from this work. First, by defining a big and audacious goal as its north star, UNCF has made it clear that transforming student outcomes is its ultimate goal. If UNCF delivers impact for students by strengthening the K-12 pipeline and getting more African Americans to and through college, its member colleges will benefit and its attractiveness to donors will increase. With a clearer articulation of its north star, UNCF has been able to quantify the impact of its work and make decisions about what it will and will not do. It has reallocated leadership and management responsibilities in a way that allows for greater focus and stronger performance, and has made targeted investments to create more robust capabilities in its marketing and advocacy teams. Critically, UNCF is also engaging its tough strategic, governance, and organizational questions with greater openness, transparency, and rigor than ever before.

Change comes slowly to the sprawling and government-dominated field of education, and it will take time for the new work of UNCF to be reflected in the goal of increasing the number of African American college graduates. However, the early indicators are positive, and we are optimistic that UNCF is positioned to honor its legacy, accelerate its impact, and sustain itself far into the future.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/21/finding-a-new-north-star-at-uncf/feed/0Fighting the symptoms of aginghttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/12/fighting-the-symptoms-of-aging/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/12/fighting-the-symptoms-of-aging/#commentsTue, 13 Aug 2013 01:09:20 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2358This is the third post in a series published by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

In our last post, we made the case for why it’s important to invest not only in scaling social innovation by building startups around new ideas, but also in social innovation at scale by helping mature, legacy nonprofits extend and reinvent their impact. We looked at the assets that these nonprofits bring to the sector: national distribution platforms, social networks of members, reliable revenue from loyal donors, well-known brands, and the heft to shape their broader ecosystem.

Just as there’s a pattern to the assets these organizations can leverage, so too is there a pattern to the typical challenges they encounter as they age. The downside of scale is, well, scale—organizations, whether for-profit or nonprofit, have to fight the creeping tendency towards bureaucratic sclerosis. It takes constant adaptation and innovation to stay relevant, and those muscles can wither if left unused for too long. The big difference in business is that companies face constant short-term pressure from the market to change or die. It should be no surprise that the business sector has paid much more attention to this issue of changing large-scale companies. Remember the “Reengineering the Corporation” manifesto back in the 1980s and 1990s? Or the “change management” wave in the ’90s, driven by technology innovation? Unfortunately, we haven’t had a similar large wave of “reinvention” or “social intrapreneurship” in the nonprofit sector. Funding has mainly focused on the front-end of the pipeline, supporting new ideas, while large organizations have largely been left to fend for themselves.

The time is now ripe to take up this charge for those who want to help drive greater impact through these legacy organizations, whether as leaders or funders. Some of these legacy organizations have tried incremental changes already, but these isolated attempts often fail because they are pursued in a one-off, fragmented way. Based on our experience working with these organizations, we’ve come to see how theentire organizational system may need to be realigned around a new higher-impact purpose. We’ve helped these groups clarify their theory of change and strategy for impact (including their program models in some cases), strengthen their organizational structures, reinvent their business models, and in so doing, reinvigorate their brand promise—either simultaneously or in rapid succession. This diagram illustrates the connections we see:

While some of these nonprofits are at an early stage of change, and lasting results remain to be seen, we’ve begun to see promising signs of progress when these challenges are tackled holistically. From our perspective, anything else is like attempting to rearrange the proverbial deck chairs on the Titanic. Turning the whole ship takes a concerted effort on multiple fronts. Here are some of the significant challenges and “signs of aging” that we’ve helped large nonprofits address in the past few years:

Lack of strategic focus and diminished relevance: It’s a truism that every organization needs a north star around which to align action. This is particularly true for nonprofits, which don’t have the profitability metric to force focus. Over decades, many of these organizations succumb to mission drift: starting more new programs in search of new funding, pursuing the latest idea, and refusing to make the difficult choice to cut what is no longer having impact. (Sometimes they don’t even have enough quality data to know what is actually working.) We’ve seen many organizations buckle under the weight of their own complexity, having lost clarity on the fundamental problem they are trying to solve or which of their efforts actually work. We’ve helped our clients reconnect with their initial purpose, clarify their theory of change, and understand how the system around them has shifted and how they will need to adapt their program or “model” as a consequence. For example, The Association of Junior Leagues International (AJLI) refocused its efforts on adapting its membership model and making it fit the lifestyle of today’s busy women; it also went beyond promoting voluntarism to renew focus on women’s civic leadership. Similarly, UNCF shifted its historical mission from raising funds for its member colleges to increasing the college graduation rate of African-American students.

Aging business models. Many new ideas are powerful not only for their content, but also for the business models they enable. However, it can be very hard for an established organization to take a risk on a new way to bring in revenue, even if its existing income streams are on the decline. A common challenge among these organizations is that their individual donor bases are large in volume but aging, and their ability to attract younger dues-paying members is dropping off. This creates an undeniable dilemma, since the organization is large enough that it can’t afford to abandon the current model. To find a path forward, we’ve helped these organizations become adept at multi-channel marketing, which requires them to build new sources of revenue that are designed to supplant the existing streams over time.

Siloed structures and lagging organizational capabilities. Another part of these groups’ gradual calcification is the siloed structure that builds up over time and saps flexibility. Some of this is attributable to staff who have been in the same roles for many years, cultures that perpetuate themselves, and layer upon layer of administration, systems, and processes designed around personalities and old habits rather than current strategic needs. For those that operate in decentralized affiliated networks, this problem is compounded tenfold: often the affiliates fight the national headquarters, and there is frequently a failure to communicate, collaborate, or align action within and across these networks. These problems can be tackled systematically or one at a time: hiring new talent, updating business processes, redesigning organizational structures, clarifying roles and decision-rights, tackling outdated governance models, building greater lateral connections among staff and affiliates, and embedding knowledge transfer capabilities within the network. We’ve done variations on this kind of organizational redesign work with UNCF, AJLI, Enterprise Community Partners, Hillel’s Schusterman International Center, and Audubon.

Dusty brands. These nonprofit brands may be well-known, but their image often doesn’t appeal to younger generations, like Burberry before its recent brand refresh. Groups like AJLI need a way to communicate a new value proposition and image to members they are trying to attract. This can be addressed with a brand refresh to communicate the organization’s current personality and promise, and to appeal to a new generation of members, funders, and partners. We’ve found it best to address this issue last. Communication and branding are essential to reenergize the organization, but they need to be backed up with real substance—per all of the above—or risk being seen as insincere.

What this looks like on the ground varies substantially from one organization to the next. In the next two posts, we will look at in-depth case studies where we’ve helped large nonprofits adapt and modify their strategy, organization, and business model.

Thisseries was developed by Heather McLeod Grant, founder of McLeod-Grant Advisors, while she was a consultant with Monitor Institute. She would like to thank the Monitor Institute team for their contributions to the writing and analysis.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/12/fighting-the-symptoms-of-aging/feed/0Making the case for innovation at scalehttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/08/making-the-case-for-innovation-at-scale/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/08/making-the-case-for-innovation-at-scale/#commentsThu, 08 Aug 2013 11:00:43 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2349This is the second post in a series published by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

As we explored in our last post, much of our sector’s attention in the past few decades has been focused on early-stage social innovation and entrepreneurship—yet this focus comes at a cost. In some instances, too little attention has been paid to helping reinvent large nonprofits already operating at large scale, perhaps because many of them are older and are perceived as being less relevant. But these organizations can be gems for funders looking to have an outsized “return on investment.” The impact of spending a few million dollars pushing social innovation—or an innovative program—through an organization already operating at large scale is far greater than a few million dollars invested in a start-up, which might take hundreds of millions of dollars to reach substantial scale. That impact may also come sooner, since even a revolutionary new model housed in a highly successful new organization can take years or decades to build itself up. Just possibly, the best investment that funders can make today is in helping these organizations learn how to operate more nimbly.

Based on our experience, many of the largest nonprofits in our country—working on very important social issues—are in fact struggling with how to innovate, adapt their models, and stay relevant in an era of virtually unprecedented change. The economic downturn is threatening their fundraising, and new technologies are driving new ways of working, putting pressure on their existing strategies, business models, structures, and brands. And the support they get from the public is under threat from born-digital startups like MoveOn and Kiva. While some might argue for letting these organizations die in the name of creative destruction, this is an important way that the social sector ought to be different from the business world.

This is not a view held out of sentiment. These large organizations have many assets—combining to create substantial reach—that are too valuable and hard-won not to be leveraged for greater social impact. For example:

National networks and “distribution” platforms. Many of America’s older nonprofits have an affiliate or franchise model, with a headquarters that loosely coordinates locally led organizations around the country. For example, The Association of Junior Leagues International (AJLI) has 293 Leagues in four countries, with 285 of those Leagues in communities around the US. It can mobilize these Leagues on local issues, and partner with them to distribute new content such asJunior Leagues’ Kids in the Kitchen, a program that fights childhood obesity. UNCF has deep roots in African American communities, a network of 38 member colleges and universities, and genuine credibility that no recent education reform start-up can buy. The National Audubon Society has state offices, 50 educational nature centers, and nearly 500 local chapters. These local affiliates can be effective channels for delivering innovative new programs, without the cost and time required to build such large networks from scratch.

Social networks of members. Just as many of these national groups have organizational networks of affiliates, they also have social networks of millions of supporters who believe in their cause and brand. Sierra Club can rally its more than one million supporters on issues like their recent “Beyond Coal” campaign; National Audubon Society can mobilize additional millions who care about conservation and wildlife; UNCF can help African-American communities advocate for high-quality education for their children; and AJLI, with its 150,000 volunteers, can be a real force for women’s civic and community leadership across the country.

Loyal donor bases and revenue streams. While it is true that these organizations’ business models (often built on direct mail solicitation of small donors) may be under pressure, particularly from social media, many of these groups have annual revenue streams in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Corporate executives know their name and trust their ability to execute. Loyal donors send their checks year after year, whether or not foundations think these groups are cutting-edge. While many of these donors are aging and younger activists may throw their weight behind sexier start-ups, it could be a decade or more before new organizations get to a hundred million dollars or more in revenue. One could argue that a more leveraged—and therefore effective—approach would be to spend a few million dollars fixing a hundred-million-dollar organization so that it can be a channel for implementing today’s updated ideas.

Established brands. Many of these large nonprofits have been around for a hundred years or more. While the downside is that some of them may need a brand refresh (“not your mother’s Junior League”), the upside is that they are well-known household names—our sector’s equivalent of IBM or DuPont. Just as many a large-scale corporation has reinvented itself for the next decade, or even the next century, so too can these nonprofits use their trusted brand as an asset. When a brilliant new idea is housed in a new organization, its leaders have to fight for credibility. But when that brilliant new idea is delivered by a brand that is already well-known, it stands a far better chance of success… and that success, in turn, can breathe new life into the brand.

A role in the larger ecosystem. Early-stage organizations can often bring new ideas or innovations into an ecosystem of players in a given field. They are small, fast, nimble, and high-energy. But it’s important to have larger organizations with the heft and weight to help influence the field. They can do things that even the most resourceful start-ups can’t always do—mobilize a million people with a single email, leverage trusted relationships in Congress, or tend to a social need that isn’t currently seen as cutting-edge. One reason the Gates Foundation was willing to invest several million dollars in helping UNCF transform itself was because, “If they didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.”

Given all of these assets, it is important to invest in “reinventing” these legacy organizations rather than just consigning them to the scrap heap of history. But it’s not easy work, as we’ve experienced first-hand. Next, we’ll look at the barriers that get in the way of adaptation and innovation in these organizations.

Thisseries was developed by Heather McLeod Grant, founder of McLeod-Grant Advisors, while she was a consultant with Monitor Institute. She would like to thank the Monitor Institute team for their contributions to the writing and analysis.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/08/making-the-case-for-innovation-at-scale/feed/1Leveraging legacy organizationshttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/05/leveraging-legacy-organizations/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/05/leveraging-legacy-organizations/#commentsMon, 05 Aug 2013 11:00:33 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2344This is the first post in a series published by Stanford Social Innovation Review.

For the last two decades, the movements for social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, and social innovation have been working to identify new solutions to old problems and take them to scale. These movements identified and filled a critical gap in our sector: how to get high-potential entrepreneurs and high-performing organizations the startup and mezzanine funding they need to bring new solutions into the world. That work has flourished in the hands of organizations such as Acumen, Ashoka, Echoing Green, Draper Richards Kaplan, New Profit Inc., the Skoll Foundation, and the Social Impact Exchange.

The Monitor Institute team and I have been proud to participate in these movements and to support many of its leaders. Innovation is necessary. But what if this well-intended focus is creating a critical blind spot for supporting mature organizations so that they are able to stay adaptive and increase their social impact over time?

We can agree that the scale of solutions today are dwarfed by the scale of the problems we seek to solve—from global pandemics to dire poverty, failing schools, broken health care systems, environmental crises, and more. In the face of this reality, we have to confront the fact that almost 90 percent of American nonprofits continue to operate on less than $1 million in total annual budget, and many of these small, fragmented groups are reinventing the wheel, or creating duplication of effort and infrastructure: most have their own staff, boards, administrative support, and fundraising capabilities.

What’s more, despite all the attention paid to social entrepreneurs and scaling high performing nonprofits, very few nonprofits —only one tenth of one percent—have gotten above the level of $50 million in annual income in the past twenty years. The well-known Teach for America (TFA) now has an annual budget of more than $250 million. And yet, despite its massive size and 8,000-teacher-strong direct program model, it is merely a drop in the bucket of the three million teachers working in our country’s K-12 schools. (TFA has arguably had more impact indirectly via its larger alumni network and the education reform movement it has helped to create.) We should be proud of Teach for America’s achievements. But no one would argue that its work is done.

These realities have led us to conclude that the nonprofit sector needs new solutions, but we don’t always need them housed in new organizations. Rather than continuing to start thousands of new organizations each year and then trying to scale them up—which results in greater competition for already scarce resources—maybe we should broaden our set of approaches for scaling social impact.

The Monitor Institute team and I have been advocating along with a chorus of others for more collective approaches: getting many smaller actors within a bounded region or issue-area to identify a problem and align their activities, resources, and measurement so they can generate impact at greater scale. Current articles share a number of promising examples of “collective impact”—Strive in Cincinnati, Harlem Children’s Zone, Promise Neighborhoods—which suggests that aligned action holds much potential for solving social problems at greater levels of scale.

But there’s yet another way of thinking about scaling social impact, which is to create social innovation at scale by building on the existing strength of organizations already operating at a large scale. We can reengineer them, or push more innovative programs out through their distribution networks, rather than assuming new approaches require new organizations. Imagine the impact we could have if we spent even a fraction of the resources we invest in early-stage ideas on helping larger-scale organizations continually improve their programs, evolve their organizations and operations, and dramatically increase their effectiveness.

In the following five posts we will present our arguments for the value of this work and our reflections about how to do it well, illustrated with two case studies of organizations we’ve worked with directly. This is an emerging area of practice and we don’t claim to have all the answers, but we do want to share what lessons we have learned in the hopes that it might spark a larger conversation in the field. Our first-hand experience of helping these organizations reinvent themselves highlights four critical areas organizations should consider as they mature: strategy (i.e. impact model), organization, business model, and brand. By understanding how these mature nonprofits have turned their legacies into leverage for greater impact, we can begin to see opportunities in the sector to mobilize assets anew and add to our set of approaches for truly solving problems at scale.

Thisseries was developed by Heather McLeod Grant, founder of McLeod-Grant Advisors, while she was a consultant with Monitor Institute. She would like to thank the Monitor Institute team for their contributions to the writing and analysis.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/08/05/leveraging-legacy-organizations/feed/1Announcing GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Conveninghttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/06/27/announcing-gather-the-art-science-of-effective-convening/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/06/27/announcing-gather-the-art-science-of-effective-convening/#commentsThu, 27 Jun 2013 19:58:52 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2330We’re happy to announce the release of a new resource, GATHER: The Art & Science of Effective Convening. GATHER is a hands-on guidebook for all convening designers and social change leaders who want to create convenings that tap into a group’s collective intelligence and make substantial progress on a shared challenge.

It provides simple frameworks for the questions that are often ignored: whether convening is the right tool to use to advance a strategic agenda, and how a convening can be used to achieve a specific purpose. It then helps readers understand how to customize the design to fit that purpose, laying out a clear series of steps for what is a naturally chaotic workflow. It then offers principles to use for each of the many tactical choices involved.

Drawing on input from 70 expert convening practitioners from across the social sector and decades of published work, we and Rockefeller Foundation are providing GATHER as a public resource to spread the practice of using convenings as a lever for deep, systemic social impact. GATHER and its accompanying workshop materials are designed for you to use in your own work, with your team, and with larger groups both inside and outside your organization.

Over the last century, The Rockefeller Foundation has seen the incredible power of convening to create shared dialogue, to debate pathways to impact and to catalyze groundbreaking ideas and history making sectors. From the Green Revolution’s improvements to food security to the dawn of impact investing sector as we know it; from the creation of a new global alliance for life-saving vaccinations (GAVI) to the development of the concept of artificial intelligence—which paved the way for modern computing—convening has been integral to the Rockefeller Foundation’s own legacy and is a critical tool for the next century of successful innovation and philanthropy.

Learning from this past, the Foundation and our partners at the Monitor Institute saw a critical and unmet need to document the skills, training, and competencies that go into a successful convening. After 24 months of work, we are excited to announce the publication of Gather: The Art and Science of Effective Convening—a unique guidebook for convening planners and change agents interested in harnessing the potential of collective intelligence through in-person convening.

Given the increasing complexity of the world, the emergence of diverse and disparate new global players, the pace of unrelenting change, and the general tendency of organizations to specialize, convening continues to play an integral role not only in the Foundation’s work but also in catalyzing progress on critical global issues. Gather is the first book of its kind to create a practical toolkit that assists social change leaders in designing convenings that are shaped and informed at every step by the organizer’s purpose. The book offers a set of design principles, key questions, and critical issues for consideration and customized for various situations that will allow almost any organization to:

Determine whether or not to host a convening;

Clarify a purpose for the convening that shapes all other decisions;

Build an effective team;

Curate an experience;

Ensure follow through for impact.

We have been thrilled to collaborate with the Monitor Institute, key grantees and peer institutions that share our interest and experience in using convening as a tool. We encourage you to share Gather with your colleagues, partners and friends on Facebook, Twitter and around the web, and we look forward to exploring the art of convening with you.

All the best,

Rob Garris
Managing Director
The Rockefeller Foundation

Finally: one inspiration for this work was the forthcoming book Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change, by Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon. Look for it in bookstores in February 2014.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/06/27/announcing-gather-the-art-science-of-effective-convening/feed/2What some African-American parents believe about education reformhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/06/05/what-some-african-american-parents-believe-about-education-reform/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/06/05/what-some-african-american-parents-believe-about-education-reform/#commentsWed, 05 Jun 2013 18:47:10 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2319The authentic, unfiltered voice of parents is largely absent from the education reform dialogue. Hearing that voice was an important objective for UNCF (United Negro College Fund) when we at Monitor Institute worked with them on their strategy. As a result, we conducted a two-pronged research study, including focus groups and phone surveys, with a sample population of approximately 1400 low-income, African-American parents and caregivers with school-aged children (aged 4-18) living to their household to understand their views on K-12 education.

We wanted to understand their concerns and aspirations to learn what role UNCF and other organizations could play in helping African-American communities demand better education for their children. You can read the complete findings in the public report we produced with UNCF, which was also written up in the March 2013 issue of Essence. There were three key themes that emerged from our research:

When we talk about educational disparities that exist across ethnic groups, we often start by saying that many low-income African-American communities need to raise their educational aspirations and aim for a college degree rather than just a high school diploma. But our research challenges that notion, showing that 87% of African-American parents and caregivers surveyed already want their children to graduate from college.

The way many African-American parents and caregivers select schools may be working against the college aspirations they have for their children. An overwhelming majority of parents surveyed (87%) select schools based on “safe, secure, violence-free environment,” prioritizing this need over other measures of school quality more strongly correlated with college readiness. In addition, data on school quality in the districts where we recruited survey participants indicate that students are largely underserved by their local schools. Yet a strong majority of parents and caregivers (80%) rated their children’s school as “excellent” or “pretty good,” even though 41% of those surveyed believe that schools in their local communities are not doing a “good” or “excellent” job of college preparation. This expectation gap can be setting African-American children up for failure.

When we asked parents about what comes to mind when they hear the term “education reform,” most parents surveyed didn’t respond positively and there was no consensus on the meaning of the term. Many felt that there is a lot of discussion regarding the changes needed but that in reality, very little changes for their children. However, 62% of parent respondents believed that public school reform efforts would be improved if there were more African-American leaders driving change. Specifically, parents view members of the faith community and other parents as the most trustworthy sources to drive systems change and communicate information related to supporting their children’s educational journey.

Building high-quality schools and providing parents with choice is not enough. Parents have high aspirations for their children and recognize the importance of attending college to achieve their dreams. But they struggle to translate these ambitions into specific steps that will prepare their children for success. With these survey findings in mind, Monitor Institute sees a number of ways that we and other actors in education reform should take a different approach when engaging African-American parents:

We should empower parents with an easy to understand “checklist” of the steps they should take to prepare their children for success.

We should forge a greater sense of partnership between parents and schools to ensure that all children can successfully navigate the college-going process.

We should recognize that messengers matter. Parents distrust systems that have a track record of failing to serve them well. We need to leverage trustworthy messengers, such as faith leaders and experienced parents, who understand the day-to-day realities of African-American parents and are positioned to help them navigate the educational system and college going process.

It is the team’s hope here at Monitor Institute that the results of this study will improve the field’s understanding of how to engage low-income African-American parents, and may eventually shift education actors’ perspectives on what’s needed. There is a great role that African-American leaders, organizations and community members can play in driving improved education options and outcomes for African-American children across the country, and there is real potential for the education reform community to embrace indigenous leadership to close the opportunity gap in our nation.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/06/05/what-some-african-american-parents-believe-about-education-reform/feed/1For-impact strategy: different data and a longer time horizonhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/04/15/for-impact-strategy-different-data-and-a-longer-time-horizon/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/04/15/for-impact-strategy-different-data-and-a-longer-time-horizon/#commentsMon, 15 Apr 2013 22:36:39 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2306Last time, we discussed three more ways that strategy at a for-impact enterprise is different than at a for-profit. Today let’s wrap up with the final two that we’ve experienced: different data requirements and a longer time horizon.

6. The supporting analysis is qualitative and targeted

While data-driven decision making is equally important in any strategic planning process, the kind of data that is most relevant in informing these decisions can vary dramatically in business versus nonprofit settings. For example, in a corporate process, a decision about whether and how to enter a new market may be informed by thousands of customer surveys and analysis of hundreds of competitive products and pricing schemes. Those can then be synthesized into a handful of market entry scenarios, each with clearly differentiated risk and profitability profiles. At the other end of the spectrum, the same type of decision at a nonprofit might be informed by a neighborhood-level demographic analysis of the organization’s target population and a handful of interviews with funders to determine whether they would support expansion into the new geography. Nonprofit leaders place the same value on rigor, but the program-focused nature of funding leaves fewer resources available for doing analysis, and they are also usually working on solutions where effectiveness is far harder to verify.

At a deeper level, the barriers that nonprofits face are rarely solved by more and better analysis. Nonprofits deal with “human systems”—the interpersonal, political, and stakeholder management issues that require high quality conversations and networking skills to align and ensure effective operations. The right answer may only get you so far before you have to start working on building agreement.

7. The time horizon is long

Finally, for-profits and nonprofits operate on radically different timelines and planning horizons. In many instances, the corporate strategy exercise occurs once every five years, with annual budgets. All of the time pressures on for-profits push planning timelines to become shorter, not longer. Public companies have to answer the question of “how am I doin’?” every quarter. Some public for-profit companies may end up managing the expectations game as much as they are measuring their absolute performance, as its market value may be primarily a function of projections about future performance.

Nonprofits may also develop a five-year strategy, but the time to impact is much longer – “wicked problems” are slow to change. Nonprofits are required to spend lots more time developing their goals and intended impacts, but may/generally find it is easier to measure outputs than outcomes. Most nonprofits require decades of work to achieve significant impact, with very few measurements available that can completely validate that they’re on the right path. Early childhood interventions provide a good example of why the endpoint makes the difference. Numerous studies of Head Start and similar programs have found that their impact on academic performance fades quickly, and have therefore questioned their effectiveness. But when the HighScope Perry Preschool Study tracked program participants into adulthood, it found that those who received early childhood interventions had significantly better long-term life outcomes.

These different timing horizons also affect organizational reactions to negative feedback. Falling stock prices push for-profit companies to “streamline” and “focus” with the expectation that if a company sticks to its strengths, things will get better. The providers of capital – shareholders – have very limited influence on the strategic choices made by public for-profit companies. On the other hand, nonprofits are pushed by funders and stakeholders to “think big,” “expand impact with new projects” and “do more.” Funders will often donate their money with strings attached to a new project or initiative that may not always align with the nonprofit’s current operations or long-term goals. Finding the resources to sustain the work without becoming the sum of your funders’ wishes is one of the central challenges of leading a non-profit organization.

To sum up:

Creating great strategy for an organization to make headway on a social challenge is quite simply a different game from the strategic planning process that many are used to in the for-profit world. The drastic differences in goals, processes, metrics, audiences, and timelines we have outlined create a distinct set of needs for non-profit strategic planning to satisfy. While there is certainly room for nonprofits and foundations to improve performance by taking lessons from the for-profit world, strategy is one arena where being “business-like” is not always an asset.

As we’ve been discussing, strategy at a for-impact enterprise can be very different than at a for-profit. Last time, we discussed how growth is not always the goal and the organization’s purpose is rarely settled. Today let’s discuss three other areas of difference: process, audience, and decision rights.

3. Bottom-up engagement can be essential

In our experience, corporate strategic planning processes often start from the C-suite down, with the senior management team working closely with external consultants and/or internal strategic planning groups to collect data and set company-level direction that is then communicated to the rest of the organization for implementation.

In contrast, nonprofit organizations often begin strategic planning processes by engaging staff members and other stakeholders to understand their perspectives on the opportunities they see on the ground and key issues facing the organization. This not only provides important information to ground the process, but begins to engage stakeholders in the strategy process from the beginning, which in mission-driven organizations is critical to effective implementation once the strategic direction is determined.

4. The audience is both internal and external

Corporate strategic plans are primarily internal documents, intended to ensure alignment and accountability within the relevant organizational units. Sharing strategy externally is bad business for most for-profits, as it telegraphs its intentions to competitors. When strategies are shared externally, it is typically as a brief, bland summary in the annual report

In the nonprofit sector, strategic plans are not only used to ensure alignment and accountability internally, but also serve as important communication documents with funders and other external stakeholders. In addition to the expectation of high levels of transparency around strategic plans – which many organizations post in full on their websites – these plans can be an effective tool to attract support for the organization and investment in its growth. For example, when we finished working with Audubon Society on its new strategy, the result was a glossy publication that was not only published online but was mailed to the organization’s entire membership.

5. Planning happens in one place

In many corporations, once senior management has set the strategic direction, each business unit goes through its own planning process that identifies strategic initiatives, cost and revenue targets and the underlying business case for each initiative. Then, in many corporations, these plans are reviewed and funded (or not) by senior management, with the resulting strategic decision-making driven primarily by the leadership of each business unit. This is rarely replicated at nonprofits and foundations, where (a) the typical organization is much smaller and (b) the organization impact is often a combination of direct-service programs and efforts to change a broader system. It may be critical to gather input from a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, but the ultimate decision rights typically sit with a small group.

Next, we’ll wrap up by discussing how creating strategy for the problem requires different data and a longer time horizon.

As we mentioned last time, we’ve noticed seven distinct ways that creating strategy for a social problem can be quite different from creating strategy for profit. We’ll start today by digging into the first two: how the goal and the starting-points can be the opposite of what you might expect.

1. Growth is not always the goal

Corporate strategic planning processes focus on analyzing how the organization can increase its growth and profitability in new and existing markets. Nonprofits should understand the systems in which they operate, the key levers for creating desired change, and how to effectively marshal the resources of others – government, other organizations, public opinion, etc. – to further their impact.

For-profit entities have their own specific agenda. They are trying to ensure their own continued success, and to maximize some measure of financial performance such as earnings, market share, or share price. But a nonprofit’s goal is broader than its own longevity, and its financial performance (in terms of dollars raised) is a means not an end. A non-profit organization’s goal is to achieve impact at the scale of the problem it is working to solve, which today more than ever does not necessarily mean growing the organization. A classic case is 350.org, which organized one of the most widespread days of political action in history in October 2009, with over 5,000 organizers in 181 countries making public demands for cleaning up carbon in the atmosphere. It considered disbanding after the event, freeing up its staff and volunteers for other work in the movement to fight climate change. It remained together only because it saw greater potential in organizing additional grassroots direct action.

2. The organization’s purpose is rarely settled

At a for-profit company, the overarching goal is to deliver increasing financial returns. The main focus is on where to play and how to win, so conversations center on the topics of customers, products, and positioning. Even when for-profit companies measure themselves against a triple bottom line, they don’t generally act in ways that aren’t good for their bottom line. Consider the many companies that are making public investments in triple bottom line initiatives. While these have important social impact, they are primarily driven by the profit imperative.

By contrast, at a nonprofit or foundation, the basic set of assumptions are often an open question. Without the unifying effect of the profit motive, it is no simple task to get alignment around what the mission/vision/goal is going to be. This is why systems mapping is often so important: even if you agree that your goal is, for example, to reform the food system in California, reasonable people are quite likely to disagree on what effort can lead to that outcome. That’s why Roots of Change went through in-depth work at its founding to collect input from a wide range of stakeholders on what the system was that they were trying to shift. RE-AMP did the same, as we have previously described in a case study.

Next, we’ll explore three other ways that for-impact strategy departs from the for-profit norm: process, audience, and decision rights.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/04/01/for-impact-strategy-different-goals-and-starting-points/feed/2Thinking big about mainstreaming impact investinghttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/03/25/thinking-big-about-mainstreaming-impact-investing/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/03/25/thinking-big-about-mainstreaming-impact-investing/#commentsMon, 25 Mar 2013 17:19:47 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2278A few weeks ago, world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland to map a path forward for accelerating the flow of capital into impact investing, a discussion which was facilitated in partnership between the World Economic Forum and member firms of Deloitte TTL.*

A group of approximately 50 participants – including multibillion dollar hedge funds, private equity firms, sovereign wealth funds, asset managers, financial services companies, foundations, and social enterprises – spent over two hours brainstorming and debating on how to accelerate – and “mainstream” – the flow of capital towards impact investing. To learn more about the insights from that event, read this blog post written by Chris Harvey, Deloitte’s Global Leader for the Financial Services Industry and Global Lead for Major Financial Institutions.

Coming out of this discussion, Deloitte and the World Economic Forum are now crafting a strategy for institutional investors to approach impact investing in new and creative ways.

In the months ahead, there are a few other large, global initiatives coming up that give attention to the impact investing space: The Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship will convene social entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and strategic partners in April at the Said Business School in Oxford to exchange their ideas and solutions. Meanwhile, the British Prime Minister David Cameron is said to throw his weight behind plans for financial innovation and impact investing. Cameron will use the UK’s presidency of the G8 this year to develop new agreements on impact investing and social impact bonds. (See here for more about Cameron’s plans.) And finally, at CGI America in June of this year, innovation in the community finance space will be on the agenda.

My hope is that through these meetings and other initiatives, bigger and bolder investment vehicles and action tanks will emerge that can channel the collective power of civil society, the private sector, and the public sector.

Many will agree that a successful impact investing market won’t emerge overnight. Different sources of capital, including philanthropic capital, will likely be needed to build the impact investing market.

Philanthropy plays a critical role in building supportive ecosystems and markets, as my colleagues Harvey Koh and Ashish Karamchandani laid out with the Acumen Fund in our 2012 report From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing. As Chris Harvey adds in his blog, patient capital is needed to make sure that the economics of individual deals and value chains work.

To truly achieve bigger and bolder initiatives, I would add another priority to this list of uses of philanthropic capital: To enable bigger and bolder solutions, today’s impact investing leaders should be given the time and bandwidth to think big … collectively.

In the few years that I have been working in the space, I have had the opportunity to work with some of the smartest leaders and biggest thinkers one could hope to interact with. But the bandwidth is often lacking to allocate resources to promising ideas that may not bring results tomorrow but that have the potential for long-term transformation. Instead, many of these visionaries are required to keep their eyes on their short-term goals.

What if the resources can be gathered to bring these leaders together in a concerted, longer-term effort to drive “collective action at scale”? Will bigger things happen? And what would a “bigger effort” look like? Who can we learn from and with along the way?

These are some of the questions that keep me up – and dreaming – at night. In the year ahead, I am looking forward to pushing for action together with my new colleagues at Monitor Deloitte and the rest of the Deloitte family of member firms. In the meantime, I welcome any questions, reactions, or answers, you may have to my questions already.

Note: Joel Bryce, senior consultant at Deloitte Consulting LLP contributed to this blog. We welcome any reactions and/or suggestions you may have for us. Contact Carolien at @cdebruin08 or cadebruin@deloitte.com.

*As used in this document, “Deloitte” and “Monitor Deloitte” refers to certain member firms of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL) that participated in the acquisition of the business of Monitor Company Group Limited Partnership (Monitor). Each of DTTL and its member firms is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see www.deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of DTTL and its member firms. Certain services may not be available to attest clients under the rules and regulations of public accounting.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonnygoldstein/8560935226/

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/03/25/thinking-big-about-mainstreaming-impact-investing/feed/0Shifting your strategy mindset from for-profit to for-impacthttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/03/19/shifting-your-strategy-mindset-from-for-profit-to-for-impact/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2013/03/19/shifting-your-strategy-mindset-from-for-profit-to-for-impact/#commentsTue, 19 Mar 2013 14:34:12 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2271Imagine that you’ve just joined the leadership team or the board of a nonprofit, social enterprise, or a foundation. It comes time to re-examine the strategy, and so you reach back into your memory banks for the last time you went through a similar exercise. If your career was in business, you probably have a model in mind of how strategy works—and so you do your best to contribute, jumping into the conversation with various suggestions for how to shape the organization. Yet there seems to be something missing in the solutions you come up with, and you find yourself unsatisfied with the plan as it shapes up. What’s wrong? What is it that’s different about this conversation that you can’t put your finger on?

Image source: onebravethingaday.com

This is a common situation. Strategy as a discipline was born in the military and grew up in corporations, and only in recent decades has it been adopted by those working on social challenges. Today, an increasing number of those running social-sector organizations come from the ranks of business, and many who start new ventures are now called “social entrepreneurs.” What’s more, where social-sector organizations used to keep their focus solely on the work that they could handle alone, there’s now a burgeoning movement to work collectively. To make things even more complicated, working on social challenges is no longer synonymous with using charitable sources of funding; now there are many models for driving impact by earning revenue. It’s no surprise that those who swing the trusted hammer of business strategy can find themselves pounding away at what looks like a nail but turns out to be something quite different.

We live that translation task every day, adapting methods developed at Monitor Deloitte in corporate settings for our nonprofit and foundation clients. Many are effective as is; others require significant adjustment to apply in our work. Through that experience we’ve found that creating strategy at a for-impact enterprise is different in at least seven ways from creating strategy at a for-profit:

Growth is not always the goal

The basic purpose is often up for discussion

Bottom-up engagement can be essential

The audience is both internal and external

Planning happens in one place

The supporting analysis is qualitative and targeted

The time horizon is long

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be exploring each of these one by one. We welcome your reactions and would love to hear about any experiences you’ve had that relate.

Members of the lowest-income U.S. families are 10 times less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than members of the highest-income families. This situation would be troubling in any environment, but with income inequality only increasing and global job competitiveness intensifying every year, it is downright dangerous—not just for low-income students but for society at large. While a field-level conversation about the college access, persistence, and completion challenges that face low-income students has been slow in coming, we believe that conversation is now imperative.

Our new report Brighter Futures outlines the problem, the state of the field, and how to collectively intensify the ways we address these pressing challenges:

Improve coordination between key actors: between high schools and colleges, within the college community, among nonprofit organizations, and between actors in the field and parents/communities

Take a moment and read these two words: strategic plan. Now close your eyes and picture one. If what comes up is a thick binder, gathering dust on a shelf next to other thick binders from five and ten years past, you’re not alone. We believe that a better understanding of the history of strategy and what caused the demise of binder-bound strategic planning can point the way to re-inventing strategy for the world we live in today. It is important to remember that strategy’s roots are military. Military strategy focuses on setting objectives, collecting intelligence, and then using that intelligence to make informed decisions about how to achieve your objectives—take that hill, cut this supply line.

Historically, the battlefield was a place where you could count on a few constants:

The past was a good predictor of the future. There were years or decades between meaningful shifts in the basic variables, such as the power of a soldier’s weapons or the range of aircraft.

Good data was scarce and hard to come by. Scouts and spies had to risk their lives to find and relay information, and had to be ever on the lookout for enemy deception.

Lines of communication were unreliable at best. Small numbers of clear directives were a tactical imperative.

Not surprisingly, after a couple of millennia, military strategy became well adapted to these constraints.

After World War II, when military strategy came into the business world as strategic planning, so did these constraints. As a result, strategic planners focused on predicting the future based on historic trend lines; invested heavily in gathering all available data; and produced a small number of directives issued from the top, for the rest of the organization to execute.

This approach to strategic planning was a reasonably good fit for much of the business world from the fifties through the eighties. But with the rise of high-tech tools and increased globalization in the nineties, the world began to change, and now it looks quite different indeed. The future is no longer reasonably predictable based on the past—in fact, it is liable to be startlingly different. Good data is easy to access and cheap to acquire. Communication is rapid, indiscriminate, and constant.

The world has become a more turbulent place, where anyone with a new idea can put it into action before you can say “startup” and launch widespread movements with a single Tweet. This has left organizational leaders with a real problem, since the trusted, traditional approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.

This has led to increasingly polarized attitudes about the value of having a strategy at all. Some leaders are valiantly trying to save strategic planning by urging us to focus even more on rigorous data analysis. Others deny the value of strategy, arguing that organizations need agility above all else (an attitude that famed strategist Roger Martin reports hearing with increasing frequency).

We think that what is necessary today is a strategy that breaks free of static plans to be adaptive and directive, that emphasizes learning and control, and that reclaims the value of strategic thinking for the world that now surrounds us. Martin acknowledged this point at the Skoll World Forum in 2010 when he said: “Every model is wrong and every strategy is wrong. Strategy in a way helps you learn what is ‘righter’. People think you can prove a strategy in advance. You can’t.”

The approach we developed in working with our clients at Monitor Institute is what we call adaptive strategy. We create a roadmap of the terrain that lies before an organization and develop a set of navigational tools, realizing that there will be many different options for reaching the destination. If necessary, the destination itself may shift based on what we learn along the way.

Creating strategies that are truly adaptive requires that we give up on many long-held assumptions. As the complexity of our physical and social systems make the world more unpredictable, we have to abandon our focus on predictions and shift into rapid prototyping and experimentation so that we learn quickly about what actually works. With data now ubiquitous, we have to give up our claim to expertise in data collection and move into pattern recognition so that we know what data is worth our attention. We also know that simple directives from the top are frequently neither necessary nor helpful. We instead find ways to delegate authority, get information directly from the front lines, and make decisions based on a real-time understanding of what’s happening on the ground. Instead of the old approach of “making a plan and sticking to it,” which led to centralized strategic planning around fixed time horizons, we believe in “setting a direction and testing to it,” treating the whole organization as a team that is experimenting its way to success.

This approach wouldn’t surprise anyone in the world of current military strategy. Recent generations of military thinkers have long since moved beyond the traditional approach, most notably famed fighter pilot John Boyd. He saw strategy as a continuous mental loop that ran from observe to orient to decide and finally to act, returning immediately to further observation. By adopting his mindset (with a particular emphasis on the two O’s, given our turbulent context), we can get much better at making strategy a self-correcting series of intentional experiments.

To provide structure to this fluid approach, we focus on answering a series of four interrelated questions about the organization’s strategic direction: what vision you want to pursue, how you will make a difference, how you will succeed, and what capabilities it will take to get there.

The skills and mindset for today’s strategic planning will come from continuously asking ourselves these questions about our organizations, programs, and initiatives. Once we accept Dwight D. Eisenhower’s sage advice that “Plans are useless, but planning is everything,” we will be ready to adapt to whatever curveballs the twenty-first century sees fit to throw.

On October 19th the Rockefeller Foundation, Omidyar Network, and the Latin America-based AVINA Foundation launched the Impact Economy Innovations Fund, an $840,000 pool of grant funds intended to help develop and grow the impact investing industry throughout the region. The launch was accompanied by a day-long discussion – facilitated by Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) – with investors, social entrepreneurs, academics, regulators, and other stakeholders. On the agenda: What must happen to accelerate the flow of private sector capital sourced from within Latin America towards solutions to the societal issues confronting the region today?

The convening was the first of a series of regional meetings being led by the Rockefeller Foundation, designed to more deeply engage emerging market investors in the global impact investing industry, who have heretofore been underrepresented in the field. Based on economic realities of the day, with more and more capital accruing in emergent global financial centers such as Sao Paulo and Mumbai, this historic North-South divide needs to be addressed in order for impact investing to achieve its potential. The goal of the meetings is therefore to help activate larger networks of “Global South” investors and to help them identify and take advantage of opportunities to unlock greater flows of impact capital that benefit poor or vulnerable populations.

While there are indeed similarities region to region, the opportunities and obstacles facing the impact investment communities across the Global South vary, particularly based on the stage of development of the local industry and macro-level contexts. In the Latin America discussion, these were the themes that stood out:

THE ASPIRATION FOR IMPACT INVESTING: CAPITAL AND INNOVATION

Keynote speaker, Professor Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Center for International Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at Harvard University, elegantly reframed the aspiration for impact investment as one of accelerating social innovation. His assertion is that the search for new ways to attract private sector capital will result in new avenues toward transformative change. Put another way, the growing focus on impact investing is helping to generate important innovations in the way solutions to pressing societal challenges are being imagined and implemented, so that as the field continues to gain speed, we can expect to see an increasing number of such solutions emerge, making change possible at unprecedented scale.

INGREDIENTS TO LOCAL IMPACT INVESTMENT SUCCESS

Professor Hausmann made the provocative remark that impact investing has not been transformative… yet. While great progress has been made, and early examples like the development of Prodem and the emergence of Bancosol have shown the potential of microfinance, and while the work of FiRST, IGNIA, and LGT Ventures has begun to build a series of investment successes, the scale of investment that many hope for has not yet materialized. Even the microfinance field, which has existed for decades, has not reached the scale some predicted.

What are the ingredients for achieving a competitive, innovative, capital-rich impact investing market?

A range of leaders at the conference, including Valdemar Oliveira Neto, director of continental initiatives at AVINA , expressed the need for a cultural shift and change in mindset, where the definition of doing business goes hand in hand with a shift in values and attention for one’s social and environmental impact.

As noted earlier, Professor Hausmann reinforced the need for ongoing innovation. Innovation can, and needs to, happen everywhere in the value chain, and daring to challenge conventional thinking will continue to be an important ingredient to success.

Eliza Erikson and Paula Goldman from Omidyar Network repeated their message from SOCAP this year that the “pump needs to be primed,” arguing that it is critical to build not only firms but whole sectors in order to achieve sustained investment in social and environmental investment success. (See their report for more details.) This is reinforced by Omidyar’s finding that business case for impact investment can often only truly be made at a sector and not at the level of an individual initiative or business.

Subsidies are needed to achieve a cultural shift, to innovate, and to prime the pump. This point is illustrated by the evolution of the microfinance market. Microcredit, now a well-established business model, required vast subsidies and time to prove the model and become established. One of the first movers, Grameen Bank, took 17 years to reach operating breakeven, while the most recent entrants, such as Equitas, only needed 1 year to reach this point. It is unrealistic to expect today’s innovative models to generate demand and reach sustainability without initial subsidies and/or patient capital.

THE LATIN AMERICAN IMPACT ECONOMY INNOVATIONS FUND

The Impact Economy Innovations Fund aims to support market building efforts in the Latin American region. Similar initiatives will be rolled out by The Rockefeller Foundation and its partners in Asia and Africa over the next few months.

Margot Brandenburg from Rockefeller Foundation explained the intent of the Fund as follows: “The impact investing field is still early stage.In the months and years ahead, those who care about changing the face of our capital markets and accelerating impact investment face the daunting cause of energizing investors and managing expectations at the same time. Our intent is to take this growth challenge one step at a time: focus on seeing what is, doing what can be done today, and watching for what possibilities exist in the ‘adjacent possible.’ The Impact Economy Innovations Fund is meant to fuel the journey that lies ahead”

For information on this or any of our upcoming regional meetings, and for information on the associated Impact Economy Innovations Funds, please email impactinvesting@rockfound.org.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also be interested in our 2012 report “From Blueprint to Scale” on the case for philanthropy in impact investing.

* * *

Carolien de Bruin is a Consultant at Monitor Institute (a part of Deloitte LLP), focused on general strategy, social entrepreneurship, and impact investing. Her clients have included actors such as New Profit Inc, the Rockefeller Foundation, Calvert Foundation, Women’s World Banking, and the Global Impact Investing Network (the GIIN). Carolien has spent a decade working at Monitor Institute and Monitor Deloitte analysing, advising, and leading strategic consulting practices around the world. She has an MSc, Finance from the University of Groningen and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
As an Associate at The Rockefeller Foundation, Kelly Teevan works on the Harnessing the Power of Impact Investing initiative, which seeks to catalyze an efficient impact investing industry that can unlock substantial for-profit investment capital to complement philanthropy in addressing pressing social challenges. Prior to joining The Rockefeller Foundation, Kelly held positions at the U.S. Department of State in the Office of Investment Affairs; the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. foreign aid agency; and the Small Enterprise Assistance Funds (SEAF), an investment management group that provides growth capital and business assistance to small and medium enterprises in emerging and frontier markets. She also worked for a startup green housing company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, managing corporate communications and helping to launch the company’s green lifestyle media arm during her tenure. Kelly received a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University and a master’s degree in International Relations with a certificate in International Business Diplomacy from Georgetown University.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/12/20/impactinvestingintheglobalsouth/feed/0How to make it fun: what game designers know that change agents need to learnhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/12/12/how-to-make-it-fun-what-game-designers-know-that-change-agents-need-to-learn/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/12/12/how-to-make-it-fun-what-game-designers-know-that-change-agents-need-to-learn/#commentsThu, 13 Dec 2012 02:52:37 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2210“By the age of 21, the average young American has spent somewhere between 2,000-3,000 hours reading books—and more than 10,000 hours playing computer and video games.” If you’re not a gamer, your first reaction is probably to think: “What a waste of time!” But in Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal makes a convincing case otherwise.She urges us to learn from game designers and tap into the enormous game-playing population as a resource for social change. She argues that computer and video games are a positive force in our society, naming twelve specific ways that games can improve the world.

If this doesn’t sound like a far-fetched idea to you, it’s because her beliefs about the power of games are spreading both inside and outside the gaming community in the last several years. Gaming has continue to grow as a social phenomenon and an industry continues (now estimated at $86 billion in revenue), and both companies and institutions such as the World Bank, American Heart Association, and Intel are increasingly using game design as part of their social innovation efforts.

She makes two main points that we in the social sector should heed:

We can and should build intrinsic reward into our public-facing campaigns.

Gamers are building skills that are critical for creating change today.

Defining “games”

McGonigal thinks about games as any activity that has the following characteristics:

it has a setgoal,

the participants follow a set of rules,

participants pursue goals and get feedback on how close they are, and

participation is voluntary.

Everything else we often associate with games (e.g., interactivity, graphics, narrative, and competition) is just “an effort to reinforce and enhance these four core elements.”

Point 1: focus on intrinsic reward

McGonigal views game developers as “happiness engineers” and games as “the quintessential autotelic activity.” (If you’re reaching for your dictionary, an activity is autotelic if it is its own reward.) She goes so far as to say that because “reality is broken” – because the reality of life in today’s society often does not satisfy genuine human needs – it is a good thing that we have games to make us happy. And she urges her readers, including social change leaders, to learn from gamers about engagement. Rather expecting folks to do good for the sake of doing good, she argues that we should start with what makes people feel good and incorporate those elements into the design of any initiatives. (It doesn’t hurt to include a gamer on your design team.)

One example is Free Rice, which asks players to answer vocabulary questions and rewards them with virtual grains of rice, donated by advertisers to the World Food Program. The game itself is addictively fun, attracting eyeballs to the advertisers’ messages, giving the advertisers a stronger incentive to donate than they would have otherwise. Everybody wins. Other examples of socially-focused games are a several-thousand-player simulation called World Without Oil, and a massively multi-player investigative journalism project launched by The Guardian called Investigate Your MP.

McGonigal examines the methods that the gaming industry has developed to keep gamers playing, many of which are based on positive psychology. She identifies four universal ways that we as humans can find an activity to be the source of intrinsic happiness:

SATISFYING WORK: We want to be “immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impacts of our efforts.”

HOPE FOR SUCCESS: We crave a sense of agency over our own lives, “to aspire to something and to feel like we’re getting better over time.”

SOCIAL CONNECTION: “We want to share experiences and build social bonds, and we often accomplish that by doing things that matter together.”

MEANING: “We want to belong to and contribute to something that has lasting significance beyond our own individual lives.”

Take a look at those four, and think about social change campaigns that you’ve organized or been a part of. How much did they meet those needs? How could they have met them more directly or more powerfully?

Point 2: games build critical skills for social change

In McGonigal’s eyes, “Game design isn’t just a technological craft. It’s a 21st century way of thinking and leading. And gameplay isn’t just a pastime. It’s a 21st century way to accomplish real change.” Most of the conversation about games for social change focuses on games as a technology platform for organizing social change work through tools such as the The Extraordinaries, which makes it fun to become a micro-volunteer on any mobile device. She argues that games are also developing the kinds of thinking and leadership skills that a person needs today to play a powerful role in effecting change. Specifically, gamers gain skill at:

Collaboration: Many games require highly coordinated prosocial behavior, e.g., playing by the same rules, collectively committing to show up, following the game through to completion, and working together to make believe that the game truly matters. McGonigal notes that even violent games often require some form of collaboration, and that the trend over the last few years has been toward more co-operative play (i.e., working together to defeat some opponent) and collaborative creation systems (i.e., creating digital content to build up virtual worlds).

Taking the long view: Many games require players to think at a scale far larger than ordinarily encountered, and to contextualize their moment-to-moment activities over very long time frames. This enables players to imagine changes that they wouldn’t have otherwise. For example, in World without Oil – a 10,000 player simulation – players were forced to imagine a future without oil and how they, their families, and their communities would cope with the crisis.

Ecosystem thinking: Some games, particularly those that put the player in a “god’s-eye view,” force players to look at the world as a complex web of interconnected, interdependent parts, and to anticipate the broader influences of changing one or another aspect of a world. It’s easy to imagine this perspective transferring to greater understanding of the complexities of real social systems such as homelessness, poverty, or a sustainable food system.

Pilot experimentation: Some games, particularly planet-craft games, involve the process of designing and running many small tests of different strategies until a successful strategy is found. Risk-taking and repeated failure is part of the game. This same mindset is at the core of the pilot experimentation and “failing fast” in innovation processes and design thinking, as advocated passionately by IDEO’s Tim Brown in Change by Design.

Games, then, are not just wasting time. They’re also a model for how to turn important work into self-rewarding fun, and they’re building people into better leadership material for creating change. World of Warcraft has enticed players to invested 50 billion hours (that’s 5.93 million years) in earning gold and fighting battles since 2004. If social change leaders succeed at making the work of social change even half as fulfilling, we could draw in millions (or even billions) of people to join our causes.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/12/12/how-to-make-it-fun-what-game-designers-know-that-change-agents-need-to-learn/feed/0Money for Good: deeply understanding the donor mindsethttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/12/06/moremoneyformoregood/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/12/06/moremoneyformoregood/#commentsThu, 06 Dec 2012 22:50:07 +0000http://monitorinstitute.com/?p=2135Hope Consulting, in conjunction with GuideStar, recently released their third report on donor behavior and charitable giving in the social sector. The motivation behind the original Money for Good (MFG1) report in early 2010 was to “seek the voice of the customer for charitable giving” and to better understand the emergence of impact investing. Building on the existing fact base gathered by MFG1’s comprehensive study on donor behavior, motivations, and preferences for charitable giving, the second report, Money for Good II (MFG2), looked at ways in which nonprofits and foundations could influence giving behaviors to support their own mission. The

newest publication, titled More Money for More Good, is a guidebook to help nonprofit organizations understandhow to collect the information that donors want, communicate it to donors in the manner they want to receive it, and connect with current and prospective donors. We recently spoke with co-author Greg Ulrich about his report and the state of giving in the social sector:

From your earlier research you identified six segments of donors, each with different motivations for giving, including Repayer, Casual Giver, High Impact, Faith Based, See the Difference, and Personal Ties. Have you seen any recent shifts in US philanthropy towards or away from one particular segment? Why is it important to see your donors as belonging to a particular segment rather than by their demographic information?

GREG ULRICH: Charitable giving is a very personal experience. Understanding the underlying motivations different donors have for their giving can help nonprofits understand which segments are most appropriate for them, and then communicate with their target donors in a manner that speaks to the donors’ core drivers for giving. We have not done any trend research, but I would not imagine that there has been any noticeable shift recently. Giving motivations are deep-seated, and while I personally would like to see more donors ultimately care about the impact a nonprofit is having (a core motivation of the “high impact” segment), I believe that progress on that dimension will be slow. Moving this market is like the analogy of moving an ocean liner, not a speed boat.

From MFG1 you found that only 35% of donors ever do research before they give, and most of those only do research to validate their existing beliefs. Why do you believe so few people adequately research where their money is going? What would change their behavior?

People research things like computers, mutual funds, and restaurants because the quality of the ultimate product or service is critical. You want your computer to work well, your mutual fund to outperform, and the restaurant to deliver a great experience. People approach charitable giving differently. They want to give to an organization that is aligned with a cause they believe in, and for that money to do some good. The bar is different. Donors are more concerned about a nonprofit not “wasting” their donation than they are about a nonprofit maximizing its impact. So, people don’t research because it isn’t seen as necessary to their ultimate goal for giving.

From MFG2 you noted that effectiveness and impact data were the areas with the biggest unmet needs. Have there been any advancements in the quality of this kind of data available today? What portals or resources do you recommend for donors to research the effectiveness and impact of social organizations?

This has been, and continues to be, a gap in the sector. Fortunately, there are many organizations doing increasingly good work here. I can’t possibly name them all, but a few worth noting are:

Philanthropedia, which polls “experts” (e.g., academics, foundation officers) in a cause area to find the best nonprofits. The model has the ability to scale, which is a challenge for some other services.

GiveWell conducts very in-depth studies of nonprofits, based on all of the available research, to find those that are having a proven difference and have room for more funding. They typically only recommend a few nonprofits (they currently support two), but donors can be rather confident that dollars given to those organizations will have a real social impact.

Nonprofit Investor is a new organization. I don’t know them as well, but they are producing some interesting “analyst reports” on nonprofits. They rely on volunteers to evaluate organizations, giving them a “buy”, “hold”, or “sell” rating.

And of course there is Charity Navigator. What I like about Charity Navigator is how hard they work to find a way to rate a large number of organizations on increasingly relevant matters. They already incorporate accountability and transparency into their ratings (in addition to financials, which has been their core approach for years), and are moving to evaluate organizations on their impact reporting. They currently cover 6,000 nonprofits (representing 50% of all gifts) and they aim to cover 10,000 soon.

What is the most effective medium or best way for social organizations to push out information on their own effectiveness and impact to donors?

For now, it’s right on their website. Our research and others’ reveals that this is the primary place that donors look. It is also important to include these achievements in appeals and outbound communications. In the future, getting this information to nonprofit portals will be increasingly important as portals become more ubiquitous. This is where donors “want” to get info – most just don’t yet know that services like GuideStar exist.

The title of More Money for More Good is based on the finding that if just 5 percent of this year’s charitable donations were given to high-performing nonprofits, $15 billion would go to the organizations that are having the most impact. What kind of effect do you believe a shift like this would have on how donors and organizations approach giving?

Yes, 5% – or $15 billion – is what we calculate is achievable based on our research; this amount could make a real difference if it’s really put to use. And my hope is that this would lead to a positive cycle:

More money goes to nonprofits that show they are having an impact. This increases the total social impact in the sector, as the best organizations are able to increase the programs and services they offer.

Other nonprofits will see that organizations that can prove their impact are getting more money. This causes them to monitor and measure their progress.

By collecting better information, nonprofits start to learn what is and is not working. By communicating this information, others can learn from their experiences. All this helps organizations perform better .

As more organizations produce better information, donors will start to notice more and more. More of the best organizations will get even more donor dollars.

And all of a sudden you see positive cycles of nonprofits collecting better information, nonprofits communicating better information, and donors and foundations giving to the organizations that can show real results. This will all lead to a more effective and dynamic nonprofit sector, greater social impact, and greater evidence of that impact.

Of course, I don’t see a world in which this is the way that all nonprofit behave, and all donors operate. But I do think that we can move a long ways from where we are today.

It is often difficult for social organizations to quantify the impact they are having. In lieu of good data, what else can nonprofits do to give donors the information they want and build a story of their organization’s impact? How can the Charting Impact tool (included below) be used to present an organization’s story in a compelling way that meets the needs of many donors?

Charting Impact is a great tool. By completing it, organizations can build consensus internally around what they are – and are NOT – doing, and they generate the bedrock of the information donors want. While it doesn’t go all the way to true “impact data”, it does help organizations articulate their story in a way that is useful for their own operations, and to donors.

When we tested the Charting Impact tool (disguised) in our surveys, we found that the information it contains is of great interest to donors, AND the idea of a self-reported narrative resonated. While the full Charting Impact report (which generally runs about 4 pages once completed by organizations) is incredibly useful for internal purposes, when communicating to donors I would recommend either:

Using the core content from it to inform your solicitations and appeals

Creating a shorter, 1-page, Charting Impact and circulate that to donors

In 2008, Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, with generous support from the Jim Joseph Foundation, began testing an innovative program that leveraged peer networks and relationships to help Hillel achieve its goal of “doubling the number of Jewish students who are involved in Jewish life and who have meaningful Jewish experiences.” Piloted at 10 colleges, Hillel’s Senior Jewish Educators and Campus Entrepreneurs Initiative (SJE/CEI) recruited and trained student interns to engage their campus peers in Jewish conversation and activities; it also featured “Jewish educators” whose role was to help stimulate deeper learning and growth among students interested in exploring their Judaism.

The idea of leveraging social networks to increase social impact is not new, but it has received heightened focus in the last few years. Networks of individuals can be mobilized to produce specific outcomes, exchange information, facilitate learning and growth, share resources and services, and align action toward a common goal, among other things. Indeed, it was the mobilizing potential of networks that prompted the Jim Joseph Foundation to provide nearly $11 million of support for the pilot over five years — the largest single investment ever made to impact Jewish student life. (The program began in 2008 and runs through the end of 2012.)

Fortunately for its investors, the Hillel SJE/CEI pilot program has proved extremely successful in its first four years; by the end of 2012, an estimated 22,000 Jewish students will have been newly engaged on 10 pilot campuses through the program. A two-year external evaluation found that increased student interaction with the program’s interns and educators was positively correlated with their learning and growth. Consequently, Hillel’s Schusterman International Center (SIC) — the “hub” of the federated Hillel network — has now decided to scale this program to many more campuses beginning in 2013. In preparation, SIC spent the last year stepping back, taking stock of the current program, assessing lessons learned, and planning for adaptation and scale.

Below we summarize the lessons learned from the first four years of the SJE/CEI pilot program, as well as additional learning surfaced during the “planning for scale” project. Many of these lessons are relevant to any group — nonprofit or funder — seeking to scale its impact by leveraging social networks:

Networks can generate multiple layers of impact in a human system. The SJE/CEI pilot program had positive outcomes at many levels: on participants (engaged students); on network leaders (interns); on Jewish educators; on the campus Hillel culture and approach to student learning; on participating Hillel directors; on Hillel’s SIC as the hub; and, on the overall national network of Hillels.

Optimizing networks can require making tradeoffs. Because networks have many kinds of impact, they can be optimized for different goals. Funders and grantees should be clear about what they want to achieve, then optimize the network for those outcomes while helping participants manage various tensions, such as balancing breadth and depth of reach.

Design for scale from the outset. The SJE/CEI pilot was designed to minimize risk and maximize quality; for example, the Jim Joseph Foundation and Hillel invested significantly in hiring Jewish educators — a costly input. But scaling the program without reducing these costs would not be feasible. Hillel was thus challenged to find ways to address this new hurdle without diminishing the impact of its program.

Manage the tension between standardization and customization. One of the challenges of any distributed network of organizations is that program design must be standardized enough to create similar quality of outcomes across affiliates, while also being flexible enough to fit the local context.

Build in measurement and evaluation. It’s important for any program scaling to multiple sites to establish shared metrics that align with the program’s goals and then evaluate progress. Hillel’s SIC created software for tracking “engagement” and paid for a third-party evaluation, but could have done more to create a common data baseline from the outset.

Learn and share together. In order to maximize learning across campuses, Hillel’s SIC established “communities of practice” (CoPs) for each of the pilot program’s participant cohorts: interns, supervisors, Jewish educators, and directors. Every single group reported that these CoPs contributed greatly to their own learning, growth, and development.

Over-communicate your progress. Some Hillel affiliates that were not part of the pilot program noted that the lessons learned weren’t being shared more broadly, and as a result, they were unable to benefit from the program’s learnings. In hindsight, Hillel’s SIC and the Jim Joseph Foundation could have used some of their seed funding to create a strategy for communicating the pilot program’s progress and findings more broadly.

The Jim Joseph Foundation and Hillel’s Schusterman International Center took a risk with their initial peer-engagement pilot program — a risk that has paid off significantly. Their emerging approach to leveraging networks as a vehicle for social change was so new that there were very few roadmaps for such work five years ago; even today, the roadmaps are few and far between. As this area of study continues to emerge, our hope is that our case study will both contribute to the research base and inspire other funders and nonprofits to try similar network-based approaches to constituent engagement as a way of magnifying their social impact. You can download the full case study from the Jim Joseph Foundation website.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/11/12/leveraging-social-networks-for-student-engagement-scaling-a-successful-hillel-pilot-program/feed/0How to build grantees’ network effectiveness: six lessons and deeper reflections from the Packard Foundationhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/05/22/how-to-build-grantees-network-effectiveness-six-lessons-and-deeper-reflections-from-the-packard-foundation/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/05/22/how-to-build-grantees-network-effectiveness-six-lessons-and-deeper-reflections-from-the-packard-foundation/#commentsTue, 22 May 2012 23:37:00 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1903Collaboration, coordination, and working in networks are becoming the new normal, as leaders across sectors work to move the needle on today’s most pressing problems. It is fast becoming a new kind of capacity for nonprofits to build, but what does it mean in practical terms […]]]>The leading edge of social change is increasingly network-centric. Collaboration, coordination, and working in networks are becoming the new normal, as leaders across sectors work to move the needle on today’s most pressing problems. It is fast becoming a new kind of capacity for nonprofits to build, but what does it mean in practical terms for a foundation to build its grantees’ “network effectiveness”?

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation set out to answer that question three years ago, in part by offering a range of network-focused support services as part of its Organizational Effectiveness line of grantmaking. We are now happy to release a set of reflections on that experience that they would like to share with the field. We hope these lessons will be useful if you are:

a grantmaker interested in building the capacity of your grantees to work in networks, and your own ability as a network weaver in your field

the leader of a network or an organization who wants to sharpen my abilities at achieving impact through networks, or

a consultant who is helping to build the capacity of others to work in networks

There are six lessons for the field from Packard’s work, each of which is detailed further in the full report:

Combine network effectiveness with organizational effectiveness
Network effectiveness is clearly a distinctive set of behaviors and strengths for a leader or organization to build. But the approaches for building network effectiveness that this experiment supported were typically combined with more traditional organizational development activities.

For consultants, networks expertise is an addition to standard skills
A consultant’s ability to build network effectiveness is clearly a distinct skillset—and of most value when used in concert with standard capacity-building skills.

Low-technology settings require high-touch network facilitation
In areas where the use of high-tech communications is not yet widespread, working in networks can be slower and more time-consuming and require a more high-touch process for supporting the network. But the benefits remain substantial by comparison to working with one organization at a time.

Peer learning builds capacity, builds network effectiveness, and enables collaboration
Not all capacity is best built through one-on-one consulting. Peer learning fills a distinctive and complementary niche: it helps grantees explore an issue that is central to their work, builds their overall ability to engage collaboratively, and also connects them with potential partners for doing collaborative work.

Networks are proving their value to program outcomes
Network-based approaches have become central to the work of a number of program officers at the Packard Foundation. Each has discovered their own reasons for achieving strategic goals through network-centric modes of working.

Field-building work remains critically important
The past three years have seen significant progress in the development of network practices and the level of interest among funders; but there is substantial work to be done before network effectiveness is considered an essential capacity to build.

If you have any questions about the report itself, please feel free to contact Kathy Reich, Director of Organizational Effectiveness Grantmaking. This reflection is one of a number of inputs into the Organizational Effectiveness team’s ongoing strategy refresh. They have made that process transparent to the public and open to outside input, using a blog that you can find here. Please feel free to contribute any thoughts you have to offer or questions you would like to raise.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/05/22/how-to-build-grantees-network-effectiveness-six-lessons-and-deeper-reflections-from-the-packard-foundation/feed/0From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investinghttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/05/10/from-blueprint-to-scale-the-case-for-philanthropy-in-impact-investing/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/05/10/from-blueprint-to-scale-the-case-for-philanthropy-in-impact-investing/#commentsFri, 11 May 2012 01:01:43 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1892There is growing interest in the role of market-based solutions in addressing the problems of poverty, through inclusive businesses that tap into the potential of the global poor as customers and suppliers—the so-called ‘fortune at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP).’ Encouraged by the growth of microfinance, many promising new models are emerging. This has elicited a rush to the new field of ‘impact investing’—producing social or environmental good as well as financial return—with hundreds of funds set up in just a few years and billions of dollars waiting to be invested.

But many investors report that they are struggling to find good opportunities in which to invest for impact. Why is that? Will impact investors really be able to take new models for inclusive business
all the way from idea to scale?

Meanwhile, philanthropic and aid funders are asking how they should engage with these market-based solutions. How should they harness the full potential of this early experimentation? If impact capital is the key to scaling these solutions, what then is the role of philanthropy?

New research from our colleagues at Monitor Inclusive Markets paints a clear picture: impact capital alone will not unlock the potential of impact investing for the global poor. Because of the extreme challenges facing those who are pioneering new models for inclusive business, truly realizing the impact in impact investing will require more, not less, philanthropy, and will need that philanthropic support to be delivered in
new ways.

This report:

Explains how impact investing is constrained by the tough realities of inclusive business, and introduces the phenomenon of the pioneer gap

Describesthe emerging practice of enterprise philanthropy, and how it is the key to establishing the inclusive business models into which capital can then be deployed

Analyzes a number of companies from the Acumen Fund portfolio to understand both successes and setbacks, and to illustrate the Four Ps of effective enterprise philanthropy

Sets out our key recommendations for philanthropic funders and for impact investors

Provides some practical ideas for what and how to fund, in the Enterprise Philanthropy Playbook

You can download the report here. If you would like to further discuss the themes described in the report or provide feedback, please write to the team at inclusivemarkets@monitor.com.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/05/10/from-blueprint-to-scale-the-case-for-philanthropy-in-impact-investing/feed/0New metrics and a new mindset for measuring movementshttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/01/12/new-metrics-and-a-new-mindset-for-measuring-movements/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/01/12/new-metrics-and-a-new-mindset-for-measuring-movements/#commentsThu, 12 Jan 2012 19:45:26 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1835When you’re trying to build a movement, how do you know if your effort is reaping results? Across all the types of enterprises in social change, movement organizers are often seen as the polar opposite of straightforward service providers such as soup kitchens. It might be hard to quantify the emotional benefit of getting a meal when you’re hungry, but it’s often enough for the people running the kitchen (or providing the funds) to know that those in need are being helped. The situation is far more complicated for the people organizing civic action, whether one as wide-ranging as Occupy Wall Street or as focused as the campaign against fracking. You can measure the number of people who show up at an event, but how can you measure the gradual shift in mindsets, greater levels of political awareness, and the strength of grassroots leadership?

It’s clear from watching the history of social movements that they can play a powerful role in achieving cultural shifts and policy change, and any organizer can tell you about changes that they’ve witnessed in the people they work with. But after decades of organizing and supporting movements, nonprofits and foundations still struggle with how to open the black box of a movement and accurately describe its progress. This is a considerable problem in the midst of the movement throughout the social sector towards evidence-based decisionmaking.

The essence of the challenge is that there is often a mismatch between the outputs that can be counted but might not be meaningful and the outcomes that might not be countable but are the reason for doing the work. I had to wrestle with that challenge in the work we did to design volunteer programs for Service as a Strategy, an initiative that gives mayors a set of instructional “blueprints” for calling on volunteers to help advance important policy priorities. It was essential for every blueprint to provide clear metrics for showing the value of the work, but my team often found that the outcomes operated on a far longer time horizon than the outputs that we could recommend counting.

From my perspective watching the field, the mindset shift is the most interesting news. They report that whereas “community organizers have not always helped matters” by being “resistant to numeric measures on the grounds that these fail to capture the… one-on-one epiphanies of their members,” today “the field is changing: Recognizing the gravity of the times, hoping to gauge their effectiveness, and wanting to add up to more than the sum of their parts, the movement builders we interviewed are eager to come up with a common language and common framework.” They also say that a change is afoot among funders: “There are a wide range of program officers and philanthropic leaders who are eager for the evidence to make the argument that movements matter. They are actively looking for the tools and the stories that can help their institutions see the bigger picture.”

But if you’re doing this work, whether as a funder or a nonprofit, it will be the meat of the report that you’ll be most interested in: a set of suggested metrics for every aspect of movement-building. (Heads up to those who participated in the Network of Network Funders and anyone else interested in networks other than movements: a great deal of what they describe applies equally well to measuring the progress of growing networks of all kinds.) They divide them among community organizing, civic engagement, leadership development, alliance building, campaigns, research and policy analysis, communications and framing, media, organizational development, and movement building (on the whole). In each area they suggest telling a story of progress using two types of metrics: transactional and transformational. They define them as follows:

Transactions involve the quantifiable markers both internal (e.g., how much funding, how
many members, etc.) and external to the organization (e.g., voter turnout, policies passed, etc). While the data is not always easy to collect (especially with transient or mobile groups), such measures tend to be easier to track because they are more tangible. But transactions only tell part of the story and tend to skip over the richness of experience and momentum that can be precursors to big change.

Transformations, on the other hand, are the vital but sometimes “invisible” work. They show how people, organizations, and movements have been altered through the collective efforts. Taking the transformation further, they can show how societal and political views have shifted or been impacted by movement building.

They also have a special section for funders that recommends the following as goals:

Build the Movement Metrics Toolbox

Develop Movement Capacities to Use Metrics

Nurture Leadership and Leadership Pathways

Link Policy Outcomes with Broader Social Change

Communicate Transformative Shifts

Document Innovation and Experiments

Adopt a Movement Frame to Evaluation

Co-Create the New Metrics of Movement Building

Their suggestions are far from a final solution to the problem, but they do represent a real step forward. If you do this work, I heartily recommend you take the time to read their analysis. Please let me know:

What challenges do you face in quantifying your work to build movements, and how do their suggestions compare to your current practices?

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2012/01/12/new-metrics-and-a-new-mindset-for-measuring-movements/feed/0MomsRising: a new approach to engagementhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/29/momsrising-a-new-approach-to-engagement/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/29/momsrising-a-new-approach-to-engagement/#commentsThu, 30 Jun 2011 00:23:59 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1633This post is the fifth in a series about our recent study of member-based advocacy organizations, DISRUPTION: Evolving Models of Engagement and Support.

MomsRising is a pioneer in providing new value to their members. Rather than advocate on their behalf, MomsRising listens to and enables their members to act. Here’s a short summary of how they do it:

Membership Engagement

The organization was founded in 2006 with the goal of bringing together people to fight for a ‘more family-friendly America’

It has focused on movement-building over organization-building

It has over 1m members to date

Quote: “The Internet is just a fancy tool that alone can’t do anything. Our Internet-based work is only as effective as we are at combining on-line strategies with on the ground organizing and leveraging traditional media coverage.”

Use of New Media

They use new media to inspire their constituents and facilitate action

They prioritize listening over broadcasting

Quote: “We’re learning that the web provides a whole range of toolkit options. It’s not a linear approach; it’s more like making a quilt. For example, our email, website, Facebook page and Twitter all reverberate back to our blogs and our actions. None of these is an isolated effort. They all intersect and build off each other.”

Factors of Success

They have maintained great speed and flexibility

They take a holistic and integrated approach

Success means enabling their constituents to affect the agenda

Quote: “Fundamentally, our success at movement building isn’t about our team. It’s about listening to our constituency. We use multiple ways of listening. We use technology to listen and to enter into dialogue and to develop community and leadership among our constituency.”

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/29/momsrising-a-new-approach-to-engagement/feed/0Do membership organizations have a false optimism?http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/23/do-membership-organizations-have-a-false-optimism/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/23/do-membership-organizations-have-a-false-optimism/#commentsThu, 23 Jun 2011 22:35:52 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1619This post is the fourth in a series about our recent study of member-based advocacy organizations, DISRUPTION: Evolving Models of Engagement and Support.

One of the most startling findings of our census was that 10% of respondents had just begun to experiment with new social media in the last year, and another 53% had just started in the last two years. The engagement model is inevitably shifting but it’s moving more slowly than we and many others had expected.

Few have mastered the new model. This is a time of disruption and experimentation, and the best way to get through it would be to accelerate the experimentation and diffuse the learning from experiments.

One in five respondents said their revenues decreased over the last 5 years, 5% saw no change in overall revenues, and 3/4 reported increased revenues from 2005 to 2010. Viewed just on the numbers, that would paint a rosy picture of the field. But given the degree of anxiety about what the next model will be, combined with the relatively recent advent of new social media and uncertainty about how to best use it, you’d expect member-based advocacy organizations to be worried about their financial future. But our survey showed that they’re not. And they’re optimistic not only because of increased recent revenues but also because they continue to have high expectations of foundations.

Looking ahead to 2012, three-quarters expect continued increased in revenues and only 10% expect to lose ground. We asked survey respondents to project the sources and percentages of revenue for 2012. The largest share of their expected income: foundations. Perhaps that is a reasonable belief. But foundations are liable to shift their focus, which could put these much-loved and much-needed institutions in a difficult position.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/23/do-membership-organizations-have-a-false-optimism/feed/0Experimentation with social media has yet to yield reliable best practicehttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/07/experimentation-with-social-media-has-yet-to-yield-reliable-best-practice/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/07/experimentation-with-social-media-has-yet-to-yield-reliable-best-practice/#commentsTue, 07 Jun 2011 18:14:24 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1564This post is the second in a series about our recent study of member-based advocacy organizations, DISRUPTION: Evolving Models of Engagement and Support.

One of the most interesting elements of what we found among the member-based advocacy organizations we studied was in how they’re currently using social media versus traditional media. What we saw is that all are working with social media but are largely treating it as a series of experiments in addition to all of what they already do through their websites, email, op-eds, direct mail and list-serves.

In other words: they have not yet arrived at the point of making a choice. And the overall result is that the complexity of managing communications with constituents and donors is increasing. The expense of direct mail is going up, the yield rate is going down, but there is no replacement strategy.

Here are some samples of what we heard:

“Over the last 15 years our direct mail fundraising has been an attempt to do more faster in order to hold on to what we have. Postage and production costs have gone up. We’re like raccoons on a wheel at the zoo — going as fast as we can and not getting anywhere. Direct mail had a growth decade in the 80’s. In the 90’s it continued to grow but at a slower pace and, ever since 2000 it’s been going downhill. But we don’t yet have a proven model to replace it.”

“We’re holding on to one trapeze bar while grabbing for the next. The formula for Direct Mail membership is tried and true. It’s proven. But the pitiful thing about the formula is that the percentage is so low. Money from internet fundraising is potentially bigger and cheaper, but no one has figured out the formula and none of us is yet willing to give up what we know for what we think might work.”

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/06/07/experimentation-with-social-media-has-yet-to-yield-reliable-best-practice/feed/0New findings: the evolving models of engagement and support for national membership organizationshttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/05/23/new-report-on-the-evolving-models-of-engagement-and-support-for-national-membership-organizations/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/05/23/new-report-on-the-evolving-models-of-engagement-and-support-for-national-membership-organizations/#commentsMon, 23 May 2011 11:00:36 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1531 If you work at an advocacy organization, or support them, have you encountered new challenges in attracting members, keeping them engaged, and attracting their donations? Many people we’ve spoken to have had that experience, and as a result we’ve recently completed a national study of member-based advocacy organizations called “DISRUPTION: Evolving Models of Engagement and Support.” Our supporters were the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, all of whom are concerned about these question for their own work and would like to share what they’ve found with the field. What we’ve found should interest anyone whose work involves advocacy and public engagement today.

Here are a few words from two of the funders:

“The report is great. You’re making concrete what everyone is feeling. It’s a much more comprehensive picture of the field than any of us have had previously. A lot of the messages are going to be challenging, painting a picture that’s quite uncomfortable for folks.” –Mayur Patel, Vice President of Strategy and Assessment, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

“It’s part of the whole shift towards leadership with a network mindset—empowering everyone and not being so in control.” –Stephanie McAuliffe, Director of Human Resources at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation

The traditional form for these type of findings would be a whitepaper. Instead, we are sharing them as slides (original and annotated) that not only conveys what we’ve found but also serves as a tool for sharing and discussing the conclusions with others. We do this not only to stay in the spirit of the participatory engagement styles that are now emerging, but also because the findings represent only the present moment in a story that is far from concluding. Nothing is settled about how even the most relevant and impactful advocacy organizations engage constituencies or attracts resources. We want the organizations themselves and their funders to be a part of its telling.

These slides summarize the most broadly relevant and provocative findings of the study. Please feel free to use it to frame a discussion with colleagues, your board, your constituents and/or your members. We will also be posting the major findings individually in a series of blog posts over the coming weeks. If you have reflections you would like to share with us and other readers here, please comment below. If you have a deep interest in the question and would like to dig in further to what we’ve found, we are more than happy to share the full-length findings, research instruments, and raw survey data findings upon request. Email noah_flower (at) monitor (dot) com for more information.

You can browse the annotated edition of the slides below:

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/05/23/new-report-on-the-evolving-models-of-engagement-and-support-for-national-membership-organizations/feed/3MomsRising: using viral video for a blend of online and offline engagementhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/05/08/momsrising-using-viral-video-for-a-blend-of-online-and-offline-engagement/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/05/08/momsrising-using-viral-video-for-a-blend-of-online-and-offline-engagement/#commentsMon, 09 May 2011 07:32:23 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1525When we heard that the mothers’ advocacy campaign MomsRising.org was about to come out with a new video for this year’s Mother’s Day, following a very successful video release last year, we were curious to hear the team’s perspective about how to create a successful video and how a video release can be used as part of a larger strategy for engaging members both online and offline. Check out the video for yourself here, which was published to their membership of 1 million and their social media readership of 3 million. This is what we heard from Joan Blades, their president, whose name many will also recognize as the co-founder of MoveOn.org. If you’re curious to hear more, please follow up with executive director Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner.

Q: The last MomsRising video was very well-received. What lessons did you learn about how to use video to engage your members?

A: Our videos aspire to be short, funny, as personally engaging as possible and include components that educate viewers about our key issues as much as possible without compromising the fun aspect. Because if we compromise on the fun aspect then the video will not be shared widely.

Q: What are you especially excited about with this video? How would you describe the approach you took to crafting it?

A: This year’s video includes a humorous and particularly clear articulation of the bias against mothers in wages. Not many people are aware of this problem so creating awareness of this in a potentially viral video is exciting. Crafting the video our team wrote a list of our core issues and suggested possible ways to highlight these issues with humorous situations. The writers took our notes and went to town. There is a lot of cutting between the start and end of a project like this.

Q: Does this online approach to engagement also include any off-line elements?

A: Absolutely. Dozens of MomsRising organizational partners are sharing the video because of the relationships we have with them. Also one should never underestimate the value of word of mouth. When people receive the video, and tell their friends about it, or call them over to show it to them, say at work in the office, this spreads the video too. People tell us they love watching it together with friends and family.

Q: What were some of the options you considered before you settled on this approach? How was this approach different?

A: We considered doing a MomsRising Mother of the Year Award theme again since we created such ones for 2009 and 2010. We also considered creating a dance video with song. We settled on the movie trailer theme because it was different yet also held the celebratory fun aspect of our previous success with Mother of the Year.

Q: What role does this video play in your overall approach to member engagement?

A: Mother’s Day is a special time for MomsRising, we try to tap it every year to inform and grow. The intent for the video is to be celebratory of mothers, to be educational about ongoing discrimination against mothers, and to foster membership growth as the video gets passed along to people who may not have heard of Momsrising before. I should add that the technology behind the video is also designed to help simultaneously grow the membership base of our partner organization who also are sending out the video to their lists, posting on it on Facebook and Twittering about it.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/05/08/momsrising-using-viral-video-for-a-blend-of-online-and-offline-engagement/feed/2Going beyond market-based solutions to create “shared value”http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/01/26/going-beyond-market-based-solutions-to-create-shared-value/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/01/26/going-beyond-market-based-solutions-to-create-shared-value/#commentsThu, 27 Jan 2011 02:19:17 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1421 It’s clear that something’s changed in the world when the cover article of the Harvard Business Review is titled “How to Fix Capitalism: Creating Shared Value,” and when one of the authors is Professor Michael Porter, who built his reputation on insight into the nature of competition. Porter and his co-author Mark Kramer argue that companies’ narrow-minded approach to value creation (and the current economic crisis) has dramatically undercut the public legitimacy of business, to the point that policy now often undermines competitiveness and saps growth in the name of trading away growth for social benefit. “Capitalism is under siege,” they argue, and the remedy is for companies to escape that false dichotomy by reinventing their strategy around simultaneously reaping profit and helping address social needs.

Viewed from the vantage point of the social sector, much of what Porter and Kramer describe would be called “market-based solutions,“ solving a social problem by building some form of enterprise that sustains itself through revenue. It is also part of the larger blurring of the boundaries between the three traditional sectors that is leading to a blossoming of innovative new hybrids that sit at the intersection of the private sector, social sector, and/or public sector. On the right is a graphic we use to describe that larger phenomenon. Corporations designed to create shared value could be placed on the bottom seam.

But what Porter and Kramer argue for goes beyond the way that market-based solutions are often discussed. Not only should we design businesses around social problems, they say, but leaders of existing corporations can and should transform their enterprises into pillars of the communities they rely on. Their examples are global profit seekers such as Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Walmart, GE, and Unilever. Each has found a way to restructure at least some part of its business to create substantial social impact, shifts that are now permanently built into the companies’ profitable everyday operations. Not every part of every company can be so transformed, they acknowledge, but they urge leaders to search for the opportunities.

Helping corporations shift towards a shared-value mindset is clearly a highly leveraged approach to social impact. Take the example of the Rainforest Alliance that Porter and Kramer describe. As part of a broader Nestlé initiative to build self-sustaining economic cluster around its coffee-farmers, the Rainforest Alliance partnered with Nestlé to teach those farmers more sustainable growing practices—changing not only how those farmers grow their crops but also the standards for sustainability that Nestlé expects. Porter and Kramer also highlight the partnerships that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is building with global corporations to foster strong economic clusters in agriculture throughout the developing world. The Gates Foundation brings together those corporations with government officials and NGOs to “work on precompetitive issues that improve the cluster and upgrade the value chain for all participants,” where the mark of success is a stable marketplace that is not only profitable but acts as a constructive influence on the surrounding society. Such examples illustrate the power of what we described as “leveraging others’ resources” in What’s Next for Philanthropy: turning big ships rather than speeding ahead alone. We were not the first to suggest that idea, nor were Porter and Kramer the first to think that corporations could be designed for more than making profit. But it is heartening to see the prominence of their argument and the growing list of large-scale experiments that they present.

]]>http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2011/01/26/going-beyond-market-based-solutions-to-create-shared-value/feed/3Now available: the Network Effectiveness Diagnostic and Development Toolhttp://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2010/05/03/now-available-the-network-effectiveness-diagnostic-and-development-tool/
http://monitorinstitute.com/blog/2010/05/03/now-available-the-network-effectiveness-diagnostic-and-development-tool/#commentsMon, 03 May 2010 22:39:02 +0000http://workingwikily.net/?p=1189What does a healthy network look like? It’s a very subjective concept, just as the meaning of ‘healthy’ differs for people depending on age, gender, etc. However, just as with people, there is some consensus around what healthy tends to be, and conversely, what unhealthy looks like for networks.

Over the past few years, we at the Monitor Institute have created a diagnostic tool for assessing the health of networks. The tool is intended to help network weavers, network participants, and grantmakers reflect upon the health of their networks against eight commonly cited areas of network health: value, participation, form, leadership, governance, connection, capacity, and learning and adaptation. These characteristics will differ in priority and relevance, depending on network type (e.g. networks for building knowledge versus networks for weaving communities) and the stage a network is at in its life cycle.

We have also taken a stab at aligning areas of network health with potential actions you might take should you chose to focus on strengthening a particular aspect of your network.

This is a work in progress. The diagnostic has become a knowledge management tool for us around network health. We have shared it in various settings, learned more about network health from our audiences, received useful feedback, and revised multiple times.

You can preview the latest version below and download the full document here.

We hope you find it helpful. Please let us know what you think and how it can be improved!